An undergraduate course on the papacy in the Middle Ages faces a textbook problem. Walter Ullmann's A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages is too teleological, Bernard Schimmelpfennig's innovative The Papacy has been rendered almost unreadable by its translator, and the narrative of both Roger Collins's Keeper of the Keys of Heaven and Eamon Duffy's Saints and Sinners carries on to the present day. Brett Whalen fills the gap with The Medieval Papacy, effectively replacing Geoffrey Barraclough's 1968 underrated, but dated, book of the same title. Whalen's primary achievement is that he explains the papacy in highly accessible terms: his prose has the quality of an engaging lecture. His story is the traditional one of the early medieval “rise” and the late medieval “fall” of an institution with its consequences for European political history. Covering 1500 years in slightly more than 200 pages, the author has made the strategic choice of a selective approach to secondary literature, and he avoids technical or controversial primary source questions. This seems reasonable and only occasionally does it result in oversimplification (as in the case of the origins of papal infallibility). Although The Medieval Papacy is avowedly a book of synthesis, it has the virtue of making mainstream medieval Franciscan prophesies of an “angelic pope” that would finally reform the Church — something not surprising from the author of Dominium of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. The end of Whalen's history is the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517) and in an epilogue he justifies his subject's modern relevance by jumping to the ‘renewal and reinvention’ of the papacy under Pope Francis. All in all, Brett Whalen has written a generally reliable, readable, and even-handed introduction to the medieval papacy for nonspecialists. There is, however, one respect in which Whalen's The Medieval Papacy book is clearly inferior to the one it replaces: Barraclough's Medieval Papacy had 100 illustrations (many in color) and this book has none.