On the 16th and 17th February the MALMECC team welcomed an international gathering of medievalists to Oxford for a workshop focused on ecclesiastical courts as places of cultural production, performance, reception and dissemination. The team hoped that assembling scholars of many different disciplines (including historians, musicologists, art historians and literary scholars) would both illuminate this important but understudied social milieu or setting, and facilitate future theorization.

A few months ago the Archivio Segreto Vaticano opened again after their traditional summer break, to the delight of the scholars that regularly gather there in search of unknown, interesting, surprising, or shocking documents. The archives are surrounded by an air of mystery, created partly by their name – the Vatican Secret Archives.  Christophe, a veteran of the archive who will soon be travelling back for MALMECC, remembers his first visit…

Christophe Masson (the lead on the ‘Ecclesiastical Courts as Cultural Hubs’ sub-project) looks at one of the most fraught periods of papal history to explain why there is a memorial inscription to ‘the former pope John XXIII’ in a medieval Florentine church.