Lecture Access

This lecture will be available to view until 5 October 2026

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OVERVIEW

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In 1303, the most powerful pope of the medieval era died in humiliation, broken by his conflict with the French crown. 

Boniface VIII's sweeping claims to universal authority–that every soul on earth owed obedience to the Roman pontiff–brought the papacy into direct confrontation with Philip IV of France, with catastrophic consequences. 

The fallout transformed the church. His successor, the French Clement V, never set foot in Rome. Instead, the papacy relocated to Avignon, beginning a seventy-year period that critics would call the Babylonian Captivity – in which the Bishop of Rome governed from French soil, raising profound questions about independence, legitimacy, and the future of the institution. 

In this second of four lectures on the papacy, Dr Eireann Marshall examines how the medieval church navigated this crisis, reinventing itself as a centralised and professionalised institution even as its entanglement with French politics cast a long shadow over its claim to universal spiritual authority.

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