As a matter of fact, papal historians cautiously navigated between both these poles. This change of pace would be the consequence of the so-called Catholic Reform and Counterreformation, two phenomena that, especially in the realm of historiography, appear hard to separate neatly from each other. In his view, papal history was invented in the second half of the sixteenth century because only then historians started to reconstruct the Roman past through the skillful use of a large amount of sources and by posing 'hard questions about the reality of change in the Church's past' (15). Nothing could be further from Bauer's intentions. Somehow betrayed by this provocative title, the reader would expect that Stefan Bauer's book suggests a new interpretation of papal historiography along the lines of a post-modern revision of its purposes. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)
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