Not only those who deal with the medieval history of the papacy, but also those who approach Spanish history in general, are obliged to consult the numerous works of Peter Linehan, who died on 9 July 2020. Since his dissertation, Peter Linehan focused on source material. This was already true for his doctoral thesis supervised by Walter Ullmann and published as his first monograph: The Spanish Church and the papacy in the thirteenth century (Cambridge 1971). This was a decisive book for the study of this century in Spanish history. In a series of articles published under the title History and the historians of medieval Spain (1993), Linehan explored the myths and misconceptions of Iberian historiography from the seventh century onwards. With Francisco Hernández, he published The Mozarabic cardinal: the life and times of Gonzalo Pérez Gudiel, a thorough study of a medieval prelate, careerist, operator and documentary kleptomaniac, where he profited from the rich material provided by the cathedral archives of Toledo. His final monograph At the edge of Reformation: Iberia before the Black Death was published in 2019.

All these studies profited from a deep knowledge of also unpublished source material. It is a great stroke of luck that, after his two-volume Portugalia Pontificia. materials for the history of Portugal and the papacy, 1198–1417 (2012), we now have access to another work of his, thanks to the fact that Peter Linehan had already consigned the España pontificia to the Catholic University of America Press. Patrick Zutshi and André Vitória explain in a short preliminary note. The work is a result of collecting and ordering material since 1966 under conditions of archives changing during this time: from copying to microfilm to digitalization. Due to this evolution the more than 2,000 regestae have also been expanded with several subsequently added entries.

Linehan sees his work as a contribution to the Censimento, which Frano Bartolini called ‘Index Actorum Romanorum Pontificum ab Innocentio iii ad Martinum v electum’, although Linehan had to limit the material to the period up to 1303. Consequently, too, he omitted the 625 letters for the Catalan region published in 2016 by Tilman Schmidt (Buttlari de Catalunya, see my review in Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters lxxiv [2018], 749–50). However, the still remaining more than 2,000 entries provide a wide range of material on the history of the papacy and Spain in the thirteenth century, which can only be interpreted correctly if due consideration is given to the situation of transmission, which is described in the introduction. We can learn that the history of the various archives leads to imbalances in the transmission. The archives in Astorga, for example, were ravaged by Napoleonic troops and the material was almost completely burnt. The largest contributions to Linehan's work come from the documents and letters of various religious institutions preserved in the AHN and from Toledo and Braga. In contrast, the important centres of Tarragona and Compostela do not have a comparable wealth of material (pp. 5–6). In his introduction, Linehan explains the increasingly prominent role of proctors and the criticism of this group of people (pp. 24–5), the importance of Cardinal Gil, and he characterises the scribes of the documents and describes the contacts with the Spanish knightly orders.

The documents themselves are presented briefly, clearly and concisely. The appendices are a treasure for auxiliary scholarly questions, not only the Index Scriptorum, but also the references to the proctors (appendix ii) or the various notes (appendix iii), which provide information on the functions of the Roman Chancery. Besides the necessary incipit register, however, the Index omnium compiled by André Vitória is particularly valuable in order to make full use of the documents. An overview of cardinals’ signatures would certainly have been desirable to better familiarise ourselves with curial working methods and personal networks.

Scholars should consult Linehan's studies in parallel in order to appreciate, for example, the important role played by the proctor Fortunius, who appears as a powerful person for Toledan and Navarrese affairs from 1236 to 1247. The dominance in the Toledan material perhaps also explains why the importance of this church also gained such a dominant role at the same time and later on in historiography. In addition, in this case, we can see how the documentary tradition shapes our images of history. However, the impressive work of Peter Linehan has made it possible to undertake deeper studies.