The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250

Colin Morris's The Papal Monarchy is a standard scholarly survey of the medieval papacy's rise to institutional and political power across two centuries, published in Oxford University Press's respected History of the Christian Church series. Its authority rests on Morris's close command of the canon law, conciliar and administrative records documenting how the papacy centralized authority over this period. As a broad institutional survey spanning two hundred years, it necessarily treats the finer theological disputes of any single pontificate more briefly than a dedicated monograph would, and it is properly read as the standard entry point to this period's papal history rather than the last word on any one contested episode within it, a role its own extensive bibliography is designed to support.