No abstract

No abstract

The century before the Reformation in Italy has generally been treated with either neglect or recrimination. Protestants tended to see the Church becoming ever more corrupt; Roman Catholics assumed that it was 'paganised' by the Renaissance. Indisputably it was becoming more Italian in its leadership. This book attempts a dispassionate survey of the popes and the clergy of the peninsula during the hundred years prior to Luther and the Sack of Rome. There is no book in Italian (or in any other language) which tries to describe what the Italian clergy and their parishioners were like at this time. The resulting picture will perhaps offend traditionalists; it will give no comfort to 'modernists'. It aims to be about 'life as it was lived'. There are many saints and sinners, and if there are more of the latter, there always are in history books, for that is how the historian invariably finds his material.

In what follows I propose to discuss certain questions concerning frontiers as they affect historians. Most of my time will be devoted to the Anglo-Scottish frontier, for the reason that it displays phenomena much more easily identified and documented than those associated with the frontiers of Europe. Some of the lessons one may draw from Anglo-Scottish frontier history are, moreover, of relevance elsewhere within the Continent, not only between countries but in some instances inside countries.

No abstract