Reviving the Eternal City: Rome and the Papal Court, 1420–1447 by Elizabeth McCahill (review)

This book is not a study of physical Rome but of its myth and symbolism—of how popes Martin V and Eugenius IV, and the humanists at their courts (Niccolò Signorili, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, Flavio Biondo, and the like) formulated their ideas of the city. McCahill addresses metaphors rather than urban development. Her focus on two liminal, transitional popes who were caught “between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between conciliarism and papalism, between an image of Rome as a restored republic and a dream of Rome as a papal capital” allows her to investigate a period largely ignored by the historiography (14).

Unfortunately, her book does not fit well into a model of interdisciplinarity. It is essentially a work of intellectual history, or history of ideas, with a quick foray into ritual/cultural studies. McCahill leaves her readers at the mercy of the humanists that she studies, unable to disentangle topoi and formulae from the historical reality, such as it is. She has little to say in her chapters about how most Romans felt about their city or how they imagined it in comparison with her humanists’ vision.

The book is clearly and beautifully written but weak at times in its review of the historiography. McCahill does not engage the recent literature that pertains to her work—studies of the Avignon papacy, the Great Western Schism, and of epistolary relations (as examined by, say, Trexler and Hayez), Nussdorfer’s recent book about Roman notaries, or investigations grounded in the socio-economic history of the city.¹ The publisher’s choice to omit the bibliography makes the work difficult to use.

After a quick survey of the situation in Rome after Martin V’s return in the early 1420s, McCahill focuses on the Colonna pope’s ancestral ties to Rome and the Papal States. She starts with Signorili’s aggrandizing Descriptio Urbis Romae (c. 1430), which stages Rome as the locale of all great events of humanity and accords with Martin’s effort at regaining control of his capital by wooing the city’s new baronial aristocracy. The pope ingratiated Rome’s residents by reinstating the office of Masters of the Street and patronizing new doors for Santa Maria Maggiore that glorified him and the city.

The second chapter presents the curial humanists’ opinions of their employers. McCahill uses humanists’ dedications of translations as a way to show their (sycophantic) means of gaining employment. She then analyzes curial humanists’ sharp criticism of the court and papal bureaucracy. Poggio’s Facetiae (1470) anchors the second half of the chapter. After a quick review of Eugenius’ rule, McCahill stays with Poggio for her third chapter, which examines the meaning of his humor. She leaves unanswered the question of how contemporaries’ appreciated and responsed to wit, and fails to clarify the relationship of this work to the rebuilding of the curia, if not Rome. By comparing Poggio with other curial humanists, however, she is able to affirm that his moral philosophy enabled him to rationalize the new environment that was developing around him.

McCahill changes direction in her fourth chapter, which is devoted to the court’s spirituality and the needs for reform. Early curial humanists (Marco Barbo, Poggio, Leon Battista Alberti, and Domenico Capranica) and their popes were intent on reforming the Church from bottom to top, starting with clerics, and not with the top-down approach chosen by institutionally driven reformers. Emphasizing personal spiritual revival, the austere Eugenius found spiritual affirmation in his support of the growing observant movement.

In her fifth chapter McCahill explores Eugenius’ use of ritual, public performance, and ceremonial display to legitimate his position and authority. She finds strong continuity between Avignonese practices and the baroque era. Since Eugenius was Venetian, McCahill’s choice not to discuss the pope’s approach to ritual versus La Serenissima’s civic ritual (as Muir did) is regrettable.²

In her last chapter...