Good studies of the papacy from the Renaissance to modern times include John A.F. Thomson, Popes and Princes, 1417–1517: Politics and Polity in the Late Medieval Church (1980); A.D. Wright, The Early Modern Papacy: From the Council of Trent to the French Revolution, 1564–1789 (2000); Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (1981); and Frank J. Coppa, The Modern Papacy Since 1789 (1998). Edward Cuthbert Butler, The Vatican Council, 1869–1870: Based on Bishop Ullathorne’s Letters, ed. by Christopher Butler (1930, reissued 1962), is a history of the First Vatican Council. Walter M. Abbott (ed.), The Documents of Vatican II (1966, reissued 1989), is an introduction to the achievement of the Second Vatican Council. Garry Wills, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (2000), is a controversial and highly critical commentary on the modern papacy.
Works on the papacy from theological perspectives include Paul C. Empie and T. Austin Murphy (eds.), Papal Primacy and the Universal Church (1974), an ecumenical dialogue; and Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Church in the New Testament (1965, reissued 1974; originally published in German, 1961), which presents the results of 20th-century Roman Catholic biblical scholarship. Raymond E. Brown, Karl P. Donfried, and John Reumann (eds.), Peter in the New Testament: A Collaborative Assessment by Protestant and Roman Catholic Scholars (1973, reissued 2002), considers the biblical problems in the Petrine question. Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger, The Episcopate and the Primacy, trans. by Kenneth Barker (1962; originally published in German, 1961), is an analysis of the pope-bishop relationship; and Hans Küng, Infallible? An Unresolved Enquiry, new expanded ed. (1994; originally published in German, 1970), and Structures of the Church, trans. by Salvator Attanasio (1964, reissued 1982; originally published in German, 1962), are basic to an understanding of contemporary “liberal” Roman Catholic thinking on the papacy. Francis Dvornik, Byzantium and the Roman Primacy, trans. by Edwin A. Quain (1966, reprinted 1979; originally published in French, 1964); and John Meyendorff et al., The Primacy of Peter, 2nd ed. (1973, reissued 1992; originally published in French, 1960), are useful studies of Eastern Orthodox views on papal primacy. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica