The man most responsible for making the intellectual apparatus of canon law part of everyday practice is Innocent III, pope from 1198 to 1216 and the most powerful pope in history. His rule marks a dividing line in medieval history. Medievalists divide into two camps according to their attitudes to the times before and after this date. Thomists and others see the age before 1200 as essentially a prelude to the building of great structures, Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, the high Gothic cathedrals, and the Divine Comedy. The opposite view is that a bright new dawn was hijacked by careerist
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