When Bartolomeo Sacchi ('Platina', 1421-1481) wrote his Vitae pontificum (Lives of the Popes) and presented it to Pope Sixtus IV in 1475, he surely could not ha

Bartolomeo Platina (1421-1481), historian, political theorist, and author of a best-selling cookbook, began life as a mercenary soldier and ended it as the head

The Catholic Church is among the oldest, most secretive, institutions in the world, but in the sixteenth century a friar, Onofrio Panvinio, undertook ground-bre

Present-day scholarship holds that the Italian academies were the model for the European literary and learned society. This volume questions the ‘Italian para

The remarkable, and permanently influential, papal history known as the Liber pontificalis shaped perceptions and the memory of Rome, the popes, and the many-la