The Renaissance Papacy’s Projects of Religious Reform between Ancient Christianity and “Catholic Orientalism”

This volume is one of the outputs of a research project that aims to analyze the theme of the reform or renewal of the Church in the years 1431–1549, by investigating in a systematic way the papacy’s ideological, political, and diplomatic strategies. During these nearly one hundred and twenty years (from the pontificate of Eugene IV to that of Paul III), the Popes tried to create a Papal State able to expand its hegemony over the Italian Peninsula, and to build an ambitious ideological strategy of political-theological exaltation of the Papacy, which was nourished by the myth of the recovery of the splendor of the origins, but which had later to face the crisis generated by the emergence of the Lutheran alternative political theology.