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М. А. Гуковский и традиции изучения истории папства в рамках научной школы Петербурга — Петрограда — Ленинграда
The formation of medieval studies within the walls of educational and scholarly institutions of St. Petersburg has been going on for more than a century and a half. However not all the aspects of the history of the European Middle Ages, even in periods relatively favorable for the development of domestic historical science, received an adequate coverage in the works of local scholars. The history of the medieval papacy undoubtedly can be included among such topics as an attractive but relatively little studied theme. As our previous research has shown, St. Petersburg medievalists (as well as church historians) of the pre-Soviet period addressed themselves to a special study of subjects related to the development of the Western Church and its central institution, the Holy See, quite rarely and moreover within the framework of narrow research issues, as a result of specific ideological attitudes. Research on the history of the papacy also became a «victim of ideology» in the Soviet years. In despite of this M.A. Gukovsky not being directly a specialist in church-historical issues in the conditions of the prevailing Marxist-Leninist dogma, managed to build a rich, well-founded and at the same time fascinating narrative about the Papal See in one of the most difficult periods of its history, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, which gave birth to the Italian Renaissance. The author of the article suggests paying attention to two main scholarly texts that characterize M.A. Gukovsky’s perception of the late medieval papacy and also of such a phenomenon as papal fiscalism, which in the 20th century became one of the main topics of «papal studies» abroad, but remained practically unknown to Soviet science.