Exploring Cultural Politics of Papal Rome

History is always politics. For governments, as well as social and religious institutions, control of narratives about the past is a vital source of authority and legitimation in the present. In the age of the Reformation this became more evident than during any previous era. The Protestant movement of the 16th century provided both a repudiation and a reinterpretation of the Church’s history: the ecclesiastical story of the preceding millennium was one of corruption, degeneration and apostasy. Much Protestant historiography adopted a distinctly ‘apocalyptical’ mode of operation, viewing past doctrinal and political conflicts as proxy battles between the forces of Christ and Antichrist and calibrating countdowns to the end of the world. A multi-volume work produced between 1559 and 1574 by a team of Lutheran scholars, the so-called Magdeburg Centuries, portrayed the 1,300 years after the death of Christ as a dramatic struggle for the survival of true doctrine, in the process accidentally popularising the notion that 100-year blocks were a sensible means of organising the study of the past.