Joëlle Rollo-Koster

The Great Schism divided Western Christianity between 1378 and 1417. Two popes and their courts occupied the see of St. Peter, one in Rome, and one in Avignon. Traditionally, this event has received attention from scholars of institutional history. In this book, by contrast, Joëlle Rollo-Koster investigates the event through the prism of social drama. Marshalling liturgical, cultural, artistic, literary and archival evidence, she explores the four phases of the Schism: the breach after the 1378 election, the subsequent division of the Church, redressive actions, and reintegration of the papacy in a single pope. Investigating how popes legitimized their respective positions and the reception of these efforts, Rollo-Koster shows how the Schism influenced political thought, how unity was achieved, and how the two capitals, Rome and Avignon, responded to events. Rollo-Koster's approach humanizes the Schism, enabling us to understand the event as it was experienced by contemporaries.

Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed explores new cultural research into death and funeral practices in medieval Europe and demonstrates the important relationship between death and the world of the living in the middle ages.

Across ten chapters, the articles in this volume survey the cultural effects of death. This volume explores overarching topics such as burials, commemorations, revenants, mourning practices and funerals, capital punishment, suspicious death and death registrations using case studies from across Europe including England, Iceland, and Spain. Together these chapters discuss how death was ritualised and choreographed, but also how it was expressed in writing throughout various documentary sources including wills and death registries. In each instance, records are analyzed through a cultural framework to better understand the importance of the authors of death and their audience.

Drawing together and building upon the latest scholarship, this book is essential reading for all students and academics of death in the medieval period.

With the arrival of Clement V in 1309, seven popes ruled the Western Church from Avignon until 1378. Joëlle Rollo-Koster traces the compelling story of the transplanted papacy in Avignon, the city the popes transformed into their capital. Through an engaging blend of political and social history, she argues that we should think more positively about the Avignon papacy, with its effective governance, intellectual creativity, and dynamism. It is a remarkable tale of an institution growing and defending its prerogatives, of people both high and low who produced and served its needs, and of the city they built together.

As the author reconsiders the Avignon papacy (1309–1378) and the Great Western Schism (1378–1417) within the social setting of late medieval Avignon, she also recovers the city’s urban texture, the stamp of its streets, the noise of its crowds and celebrations, and its people’s joys and pains. Each chapter focuses on the popes, their rules, the crises they faced, and their administration but also on the history of the city, considering the recent historiography to link the life of the administration with that of the city and its people. The story of Avignon and its inhabitants is crucial for our understanding of the institutional history of the papacy in the later Middle Ages. The author argues that the Avignon papacy and the Schism encouraged fundamental institutional changes in the governance of early modern Europe—effective centralization linked to fiscal policy, efficient bureaucratic governance, court society (société de cour), and conciliarism. This fascinating history of a misunderstood era will bring to life what it was like to live in the fourteenth-century capital of Christianity.

This volume seeks to investigate the testamentary practices of women in medieval and early modern France, examining the experience of a cross-section of the population, from artisans to the elite, in Aix-en-Provence, Avignon, Marseille, Montpellier, La Rochelle, Brittany, and Burgundy. The making of a will was perhaps the single most prominent moment in women’s lives for the assertion of agency. Though constrained to some degree by customary practice and the increasing influence of Roman law, women demonstrated remarkable initiative in the formulation of their last wishes. Wills permitted women to reward friendship and loyalty, to designate universal heirs as major beneficiaries, to stipulate conditions of inheritance so that last wishes were carried out, and, perhaps most importantly, to make pious donations to the Church for the salvation of the testators’ souls. They chose their burial sites and arranged for funeral processions, and they endowed anniversary masses for their souls in perpetuity. Individual testamentary decisions differed, as did spousal strategies, but the reinforcement of family ties, even the assertion of relationship, was possible in wills.

Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The Empty See
a. Empty See Governance and the Papal Electoral System
b. The Liturgy of the Empty See
c. Looting, Charity, and Liturgy

2. The Empty See as Liminal Phenomenon

3. Looting the Empty See: The Early Chronology
a. Introducing Spolia: The Connection with the Ancient
b. Early Spoils: Historiography
c. Evidence
d. Right of Spoil

4. Looting the Empty See: The Great Western Schism (1378)
a. Rome 1378: Quick Historiography
b. Rome 1378: Background
c. Rome 1378: “Romanum Volumus Papam Vel Omnes Moriemini!”

Conclusion: More Loot

Works Cited and Bibliography
Index

Introduction: The Great Schism and the Scholarly Record, Joëlle Rollo-Koster and Thomas M. Izbicki
Civil Violence and The Initiation of the Schism, Joëlle Rollo-Koster
Luxury and Extravagance at the Papal Court in Avignon and the Outbreak of the Great Western Schism, Stefan Weiß
Local Experiences of the Great Western Schism, Philip Daileader
The Conceptualization and Imagery of the Great Schism, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
Witness to the Schism: The Writings of Honorat Bovet, Michael Hanly
Byzantium, Islam, and the Great Western Schism, Michael A. Ryan
Seeking Legitimacy: Art and Manuscripts for the Popes in Avignon from 1378 to 1417, Cathleen A. Fleck
The Reform Context of the Great Western Schism, Christopher M. Bellitto
Extra ecclesiam salus non est—sed quae ecclesia?: Ecclesiology and Authority in the Later Middle Ages, David Zachariah Flanagin
The Authority of Peter and Paul: The Use of Biblical Authority during the Great Schism, Thomas M. Izbicki
The Council of Constance (1414–18) and the End of the Schism, Philip H. StumpM
Conclusion: The Shadow of the Schism, Thomas M. Izbicki

Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Table of Contents

Foreword by Kathryn L. Reyerson
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Background to the Liber Divisionis
A. Avignonese Political Institutions
B. Population
C. Judicial Institutions
D. Citizens or Courtiers
2. The Liber Divisionis
A. External Description of the Document
B. Finality and Recording Procedure
C. Dating and Meaning of the Liber
D. Conclusion
3. Notre Dame La Majour
A. Avignonese Confraternities
B. Presentation and Statutes
C. Diplomatic Analysis
D. Recording Procedure
The Repetition of Names in Successive Lists
Crosses and Addenda
Roman Numerals
E. The Dates of the Documents
Dating ND2
Dating ND1
F. The Role of the Confraternity
G. Conclusion
4. How to Read the Documents
1. The Liber Divisionis
A. Editorial Marking
B. Standardization
2. Notre Dame la Majour
A. Editorial Marking
B. Standardization
3. Notes to the Documents
5. Edition of the Liber Divisionis
6. Edition of the Matriculation Lists of Notre Dame la Majour
Appendix One: Concordance: Place Names
Appendix Two: Concordance: Professions
Bibliography and Works Cited
Index

The Great Schism divided Western Christianity between 1378 and 1417. Two popes and their courts occupied the see of St. Peter, one in Rome, and one in Avignon. Traditionally, this event has received attention from scholars of institutional history. In this book, by contrast, Joëlle Rollo-Koster investigates the event through the prism of social drama. Marshalling liturgical, cultural, artistic, literary and archival evidence, she explores the four phases of the Schism: the breach after the 1378 election, the subsequent division of the Church, redressive actions, and reintegration of the papacy in a single pope. Investigating how popes legitimized their respective positions and the reception of these efforts, Rollo-Koster shows how the Schism influenced political thought, how unity was achieved, and how the two capitals, Rome and Avignon, responded to events. Rollo-Koster's approach humanizes the Schism, enabling us to understand the event as it was experienced by contemporaries.

This essay argues that liturgists responded to the Great Western Schism (1378-1417), with liturgical rubrics. During this period, authors were essentially motivated with the recovery of ecclesiastical unity. I will analyze how Pierre Ameil, a contemporary of the Schism and the author of a ceremonial book or ordo attempted to reconstruct unity by developing a new rubric centered on the rituals surrounding the pope's death. By keeping the papal body one, both natural and institutional, Ameil responded to the College of Cardinals whom he knew was responsible for the initiation of the crisis. Contrary to current historiography that sees liturgists building institutional continuity during the Vacant See on the college of Cardinals, the essay proposes that Ameil built continuity on the embalmed papal corpse presenting it as both natural and institutional, at once finite and eternal. Keywords: Great Western Schism, liturgy, body, Papal funerals, senses, Pierre Ameil.  On cover:Monks si...

This study investigates cultural appropriation in late medieval Avignon. It is an illustration of how a notoriously disenfranchised group, prostitutes, creatively appropriated an ascendant cultural model, that of traditional con-ventual life, to better their own lot in life. This process of ...

“The Great Western Schism, Legitimacy, and Tyrannicide: The Murder of Louis of Orleans (1407).” In On the Edge of Modernity: Studies in European Intellectual History in Honor of Thomas M. Izbicki. Edited by Bettina Koch and Cary J. Nederman (Kalamazoo: Arc Humanities Press & Medieval Institute Publications, 2018), 193-211.

"Failed Ritual? Medieval Papal Funerals and the Death of Clement VI (1352)," " in  Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion: Infectious Corpses and Contested Burials, ed. Christos Lynteris, and Nicholas Evans (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 27-53.

Review of Bachrach, David S., ed. (2014). The Histories of a Medieval German City, Worms c. 1000—c. 1300: Translation and Commentary. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. illustrations, bibliography, index, $109.95 (hardcover).190 pp.; Mostert, Marco, and Anna Adamska, eds. (2014). Writing and the Administration of Medieval Towns: Medieval Urban Literacy I. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. 382 pp., illustrations, notes, index, €90 (hardcover); Mostert, Marco, and Anna Adamska, eds. (2014). Uses of the Written Word in Medieval Towns: Medieval Urban Literacy II. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. illustrations, notes, index, €100 (hardcover).453 pp.; Rawcliffe, Carole (2013). Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. 445 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $99 (hardcover).

Workshop:

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Rollo-Koster Lecture:

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