The chapters brought together in this volume build on the idea that in the 1970s-1980s the global language of human rights contributed to stimulating ideas of reform in the communist world. The protagonists were Mikhail Gorbachev and the Italian communists. The experience of the PCI was in many ways a peculiar case, but one that was linked to underground ideas of cultural change even in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's ascent signalled a fundamental shift, as he rejected the approach of reducing human rights to an ideological battleground and instead made it the centrepiece of a universalist relaunch. By exploring the encounter between reform communists and human rights, the authors reconstruct the metamorphosis and the end of communism within the context of the wider transformations taking place in European political cultures at the end of the Cold War.
Late Medieval Papal Legation is a result of long term study of papal legates in the late medieval period. Even though this crucial institution of the reform papacy of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries kept its standards as designed in the classical canon law, it was transformed according to the current needs of the papacy in later periods. A substantial change came after the conciliar crisis and before the radical transformation of the first half of the sixteenth century. In the second half of the 15th and early 16th centuries, papal legates de latere, as cardinals, travelled all around Europe in support of the recovered papal authority after the conciliar period and before the outbreak of the German Reformation. The volume focuses on the terminology and theory of papal legation, on the sources and expression of legatine authority and on the system in relation to practical matters, and political, diplomatic and ecclesiastical tasks and topics. The study of the legatine office is exceptionally complex and ranges from high diplomacy and spiritual benefits brought for distinct provinces, to the personal interests and involvement of individual cardinals.
The appraisal of the political dialogue and negotiations with the communist regimes of East Central Europe commenced by the Holy See in the 1960s did not provoke only lively debates among contemporaries, but remains to the present day one of the most debated questions of the twentieth-century history: should it be assessed as a fixed path to which no alternative existed, or was it a flawed initiative which merely served the international legitimacy of the communist totalitarian system?
This volume enriches the results of earlier historiography with new perspectives and confirmes inter alia that a black-and-white reading (often based on a one-sided use of sources) of Ostpolitik is incorrect: just as the critical assessment, which frequently places local considerations at the forefront, requires revision, the at times apologetic outlook defending the Vatican’s Eastern policy is also untenable. Only a nuanced and source-focused analysis of the ambitions of the Roman and Muscovite centers, and of local politics and Churches, as well as dialogue between the various research trends, can help us to gain a more thorough knowledge of (and make us better understand) those fixed paths upon which the Roman and local ecclesiastics of the era were forced to travel and which limited the possibility of success.