hiltfredus

I am a student, somewhere.

It occurred to me, recently, that almost all the information about the early and medieval papacy available online (including, I fear, a number of write-ups on E2) derives from one of several, outdated online sources. The most important of these is the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia, which one can now find online at www.newadvent.org/cathen . Another source is the Roberts and Donaldson Nicene and Ante-Nicene Fathers (also online, to be found at http://www.ccel.org/fathers2), from which a number of the Wikipedia papal biographies are derived. Now on the one hand, both of these works--especially the Catholic Encyclopedia--constitute important resources and I use them myself all the time. But as far as the antique and medieval papacy goes, they are full of religious bias and outdated scholarship.

So I thought it might be worthwhile to try to build up an alternative source of information about the popes of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, derived directly from the primary sources, the best of modern scholarship, and my own critical sense (or something). I'll never issue enough material to rival all the pious and preposterous information floating around, but I'll be satisfied merely to learn something as I work through the Popes, one after the other.

I'll go in chronological order, from Linus forwards, until boredom sets in (at which point I'll jump ahead to the later, more interesting guys).