I am indebted to the highly followable @TLockyer on Twitter for drawing my attention to a fascinating paper available via the marvelous Medievalist.net resource.
http://www.medievalists.net/2011/05/01/franchise-conflict-the-tide-of-antipopes-in-the-aftermath-of-the-eastern-schism/
This looks at the idea that the Church can be thought of as a franchise in quite a lot of detail and uses this idea to interpret so key historical events.
I have done a very quick and unscripted podcast on it, that is not up to the normal standard of my more regular ones. The big problem with doing podcasts is finding the time to write the scripts. They are much harder work than just doing a quick bit of writing and the hours just disappear. I am toying with the idea of doing more unscripted ones just to keep the volume of material in the podcast stream up. But please let me know if you'd rather I didn't do this. I do realise that listening to people saying um a lot can be a bit tedious.
Sorry folks, but the original draft of this blog post got lost in the problems on Blogger around the 13th of May. I didn't realise until the podcast was already out on iTunes. I don't know if I'll ever be able to recreate the beautiful one paragraph summary I had written. Now it is lost for ever I have become convinced it was a truly great if short bit of writing. I tend to think that about most of what I write unless I make the mistake of rereading it, when I discover all the flaws that somehow crept in during the transcription from my brain into actual words. Labels: Gibbon