Abstract

The author endeavours to draw a map of Italian studies on the bishops and the medieval papacy in the last forty years, with the progressive separation of the research on religious history, variously inspired by Raffaello Morghen and Giovanni Miccoli, from that of the history of ecclesiastical and religious institutions, which is more concerned with grasping the connections between ecclesiastical structures and political-social questions. In both strands a progressive complication of the historiographical reconstruction is evident, together with the rejection of the concept of crisis as the key to interpreting historical development.