For students of the late antique Roman church and its bishops, the Liber Pontificalis (henceforth LP) is an indispensable source. Starting with Peter, believed to be the city of Rome's first pope, the LP presents short accounts of the lives of each successive Roman bishop through the ninth century, highlighting their administrative achievements, building projects, doctrinal positions, and liturgical innovations. It is not an exaggeration to say that without this serial biography of Roman popes, our knowledge of the early Roman church would be significantly diminished. Yet, the LP is not without its problems. Begun in the first decades of the sixth century and resumed in fits and starts over the next four centuries, the text was subject to multiple recensions and redactions, and scholars still puzzle over the relationship between extant versions. What is more, its triumphalist rhetoric masks many of the challenges faced by Roman bishops.

John Moorhead's The Popes and the Church of Rome in Late Antiquity is an erudite modern revision of the LP with all the virtues and far fewer of the late-ancient text's vices. Written presumably for nonspecialists (his audience is not actually identified), The Popes and the Church of Rome presents a series of finely researched and well-written biographies of each pope, with a focus on many of the same topics that concerned the writers of the LP: clerical relations, care of the poor, building activities, doctrinal issues, ritual developments, and high political connections, whether to the local senatorial government, the exarch, or the emperor. However, rather than begin with Peter and the mythic apostolic beginnings of the Roman church, Moorhead starts his study with the episcopate of Leo (440–461), whose extant writings are especially copious, and whose avid interest in the figure of Peter provides Moorhead with opportunities to sketch out earlier ideological and administrative developments. He then moves on to discuss each successive Roman bishop, grouping his chapters chronologically according to divisions that generally make good historical sense (for example, chapter 1, from 440–98; chapter 2, from 498–555). The book ends with the episcopate of Zacharias (741–752) and thus with the early stages of the Roman church's transition toward the Frankish court.

Although his book closely hews to a late antique model of papal biography, Moorhead nevertheless shows that the history of the Roman church need not be told as a story of triumph and progress. Eschewing the very term “papacy” and the adjectival correlative “papal” precisely because of their high medieval connotations, Moorhead tries to undermine the teleological framework that orients much of the LP—and so many modern histories of the Roman church and its bishops—by highlighting the manly weaknesses and failures of the popes. Pope Gregory I may have been the darling of late medieval exegetes and clerical reformers, but Moorhead shows that he was hated by his immediate successor, Sabinianus, and that his monkish redressing of clerical culture was more a failed experiment than the start of a new trend. Moreover, Moorhead invites the reader to see the Roman church as embedded within its larger, changing world. While the book follows a strict chronological organization, each chapter contains numerous thematic interludes that develop topics related directly to the broader history of the late-ancient Roman church. With sections on women, martyrs, books, relics, enduring non-Christian practices (neatly placed at the very end of the study), as well as larger excurses on the Roman church's relationship to ecclesiastical practices elsewhere (Byzantium, but also Spain, England, and Gaul/Francia), Moorhead overcomes the narrowness of the LP’s purview, and in so doing, offers readers a more holistic account of the Roman church in its formative years.

Yet in the end, I would argue that Moorhead does not go far enough in dismantling the interpretive framework that the LP established and that so many later historians of the Roman papacy have followed. For one, despite an extensive reliance on the LP for material (a reliance that cannot be helped given the paucity of sources on so many Roman bishops from this era), Moorhead offers relatively little discussion of the source itself, which by all accounts is deeply complex and fraught with heuristic challenges. In just two pages of discussion on the LP, half of which focuses oddly (but interestingly) on the figure of the emperor Diocletian, readers are given only the most general sense that they are looking at one iteration of a “living source” with multiple extant editions, or that different authors/parties wrote (and even rewrote) the individual lives of earlier popes in order to make claims about Roman episcopal authority in their own period. It is not simply a question of distinguishing “false” from “reliable” information, as Moorhead's discussion suggests. Here the analysis would have profited from the critical work of Claire Sotinel, whose study of the LP on the lives of Silverius and Vigilius receives only a nod in the bibliography.

Overall, Moorhead's book achieves its goal of presenting the Roman church as a “Christian community in late antiquity” (p. xii). Moreover, he does so in a manner that is accessible to readers with little experience navigating the warren of modern scholarship that constitutes papal studies. By insisting upon seeing the history of the Roman church as something more than the story of a singular ecclesiastical institution, The Popes and the Church of Rome in Late Antiquity makes an important historiographical contribution.