Though familiar to German-speaking historians of the late medieval and early modern Roman court, the late Brigide Schwarz may be a new name to Anglophone readers. Among her many contributions - her bibliography in this volume alone lists some 50 works - she left an immense prosopographical corpus, most notably through her leadership in compiling entries on German curial administrators and their guilds or colleges for the Repertorium Germanicum, especially during the pontificate of Eugene IV (1431-1447).

Following the opening of the Vatican Archives in 1881, several European countries established Roman research centers to collect data on their national representatives at the papal court, including the British and French schools and the Deutsches Historisches Institut, where Schwarz worked for many years and ultimately served on the academic board. Mixing the arcane art of paleography with the digital technology required for compiling the Repertorium, she advanced our understanding of the German presence at the curia between 1378 and 1517. That database, based on Vatican registers and now available online [1], is a vital resource for scholars of the late medieval church.

As noted by Wolfgang P. Müller, editor of the present volume, Schwarz's name was largely unknown outside Germany. In 2018, he invited her to select essays she wished to see translated into English. She passed away the following year. This volume is the product of that collaboration. The essays, written between 1983 and 2018, are organized in two parts: one on ecclesiastical benefices, the other on curial offices. Most are prosopographical in nature, offering rich, detailed accounts of the careers of individuals who held benefices or served as curial officers. The volume concludes with a substantial bibliography (featuring Schwarz's own work and broader curial historiography) and a detailed index. Scholars will especially appreciate the numerous original tables throughout, offering data such as: the number of German petitions under Eugene IV; a list of Polish clerics (1322-1356); comparisons of benefices received in 1407 and 1427; a list of Meissen bishops (1300-1476); council seating arrangements; Chancery ceremonial positioning; and the competencies of the Vice-Chancellor circa 1320.

Where much of the existing literature focuses on institutional history and the papacy's shifting authority, Schwarz humanizes the late medieval curia by examining the careers of the people who made the institution function - the "operators, careerists, and opportunists," in Müller's words (17). Rather than presenting these figures as an elite class, she frames them as something akin to "public employees." Their careers were subject to many of the same instabilities faced by bureaucrats today - clerics who lost benefices due to their choice of obedience during the Schism, for example.

The study's core inquiry is what holders of curial positions could expect from the institution. Müller outlines the varieties of ecclesiastical roles Schwarz examines. Clerics could obtain benefices - sources of income tied to spiritual duties and often physical property - through the curia. Selling these positions was officially simony, but curial offices (unlike benefices) were open to laymen and married men, employed for life and paid stipends. These officers typically purchased their positions and earned fees from their services - effectively transforming their roles into economic investments, immune to simony accusations. Schwarz deftly tracks this complex market, revealing the intricate career networks and "rope-teams" - kin- and region-based alliances - that shaped success at the curia. These "rope-teams," she writes, extended from Rome into officials' home territories (193), providing essential social capital.

The volume opens with a foundational essay on the benefice market in the German Empire, where the Avignon papacy increasingly reserved the collation of even minor benefices to itself. Schwarz draws vivid parallels between curial manœuvering and modern financial speculation. Through papal letters and career reconstructions, she evokes a cutthroat world of "entrepreneurial skills, inventiveness, and vigilance" (36). Nicholas of Cusa serves as an initial example; subsequent essays trace Hanoverian clerics such as Dietrich Reseler, Johann Schele, and Dietrich of Nieheim, as well as Ludolf Grove and his nephew Ludolf Nagel, who also influenced early German banking. As Schwarz notes, "The Curia was an exchange in the strict economic sense..." (76), where mandates, dispensations, and positions were actively traded. Her work transforms our understanding of ecclesiastical offices, emphasizing individual agency and the market logics that undergirded curial life.

Later chapters reinforce this career-centered approach. Her analysis of Nanker, bishop of Kraków and Wrocław, as well as of Chancellor Georg of Haugwitz's career, highlights the intersection of local and curial documentation. Her work on Meissen during the Schism shows how papal crises affected diocesan governance.

The second part of the volume broadens the scope by considering curial offices themselves. Schwarz convincingly argues that the medieval Church pioneered venal officeholding long before early modern absolutist regimes normalized the practice.

The Schism's financial and administrative consequences take center stage in several chapters. While papal revenues dropped, new fees were introduced, curial offices transformed into benefices, and institutional oversight weakened. As guilds of curial officers gained autonomy, traditional hierarchies eroded. Schwarz concludes that papal governance served above all to meet the demand for legitimation, adjudication, and exemption (192). The proliferation of "rope-teams" and clienteles during the Schism exemplifies the increasingly fragmented nature of curial authority. Her discussion of papal reform shows that contemporary critiques - focused on simony, the overuse of substitutes, office accumulation, and lack of transparency - resonate uncannily with modern bureaucratic complaints.

The final three essays spotlight specific groups of curial officials. One examines cursors - papal messengers - through their statutes and duties. Another traces Leon Battista Alberti's rise through various chancery offices, demonstrating how administrative positions facilitated his entrée into Renaissance intellectual circles. The concluding chapter explores the evolution of the Vice-Chancellor's office as it supplanted the traditional chancellorship.

Strikingly, Schwarz never isolates nepotism as a distinct category of analysis, not because she ignores its presence, but because - within curial logic - it was embedded in normal governance through networks of patronage and kinship.

Brigide Schwarz's essays, brought together in this masterfully translated and curated volume, offer not only a prosopographical treasure trove but a reconceptualization of the late medieval curia as a socio-economic system. Her work bridges the gap between bureaucratic functionality and human ambition, showing how clerics and officers navigated power structures through intellect, strategy, and social capital. What emerges is a curia that feels startlingly modern - competitive, transactional, and networked. For historians of the Church, of institutions, and of labor and mobility, this volume is an indispensable model of archival acumen and historical imagination.

Medieval historians are known to be overly critical. I cannot be. I only found one error. On page 181 the text discussing the Schism reads Clement VI for Clement VII.

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[1] https://dhi-roma.it/

Joëlle Rollo-Koster