The History of the Medieval Papacy at the Imperial St. Petersburg University

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate the history and content of scholarly studies devoted to the history of the medieval papacy at St. Petersburg University of pre-revolutionary times. The tasks of the article include both the study of historiographical sources, and a survey of disciplines related to the history of the medieval papacy taught at the Faculty of History and Philology of the University in 1819–1917. The author draws attention to the fact that this subject of educational courses and scholarly research for a long time remained “unpopular” among St. Petersburg medievalists. However, a real outline of university research in the field of “papal history” in historiography still hasn’t been done. The main way to identify the required courses of historical and ecclesiastical nature was to analyze university editions known as “The Announcements of Public Teaching of Sciences” and “Surveys of the Teaching of Sciences at the Imperial St. Petersburg / Petrograd University” and now accessible to a wide audience thanks to the portal “History St. Petersburg University in Virtual Space”. The author also refers to the materials collected during the biographical and prosopographical studies of the Center for History of St. Petersburg State University and concentrated in a number of network dictionaries (“The Network Biographical Dictionary of Professors and Teachers of St. Petersburg University” etc). On the basis of the data obtained, the author draws a conclusion about the extent to which the pre-revolutionary university research in the field of the history of the Holy See was developed and promising in reality.