Lecture Access

This lecture will be available to view until 2 November 2026

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OVERVIEW

Watch on Demand | Online Lectures


When the popes returned to Rome after nearly a century in Avignon, they found a city barely recognisable as the former capital of the world. 

Aqueducts had failed, monuments lay stripped for building material, and the population had collapsed to a fraction of its ancient size. Yet within little more than a generation, Rome had been reborn — and the papacy along with it.

Beginning with the shrewd political vision of Martin V, and carried forward by a succession of extraordinary humanist popes, the fifteenth century witnessed a deliberate and breathtaking reinvention of both a city and an institution. Nicholas V built libraries and restored aqueducts. Pius II made Rome the intellectual capital of Christendom. Sixtus IV commissioned the Sistine Chapel. Julius II set Michelangelo and Raphael to work. Each pope understood that to rebuild Rome was to rebuild papal authority itself.

In this third lecture in a four-part series, Dr Eireann Marshall explores how ambition, scholarship, and artistic genius combined to transform the medieval papacy into the supreme cultural power of the Renaissance world.

LECTURER

Biography

Eireann is an Honorary Research Associate and Associate Lecturer with The Open University. Raised in the Veneto and educated at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the Universities of Birmingham and Exeter, she brings a rich international perspective to classical civilisation. With extensive experience as a lecturer and tour leader across Italy, Tunisia, Sicily and beyond including Venice, Pompeii and Ravenna – Eireann is bilingual in English and Italian, and combines scholarly rigour with engaging storytelling. Her lectures for Academy Travel invite listeners to explore the ancient world not just as history but as a living dialogue between past and present – bringing monuments, art and ideas vividly to life.

Dr Eireann Marshall

Classicist & Historian