This volume is the product of a conference held at Friburg in Switzerland in March 2012. It is international, containing sixteen substantial papers from scholars from the USA, Switzerland, Germany, the UK, Italy, France and Russia. The congress and this publication have been an attempt to rectify the relative lack of scholarly attention given to the pivotal pontificate of the Avignon pope, John xxii (1316–34).

John's reign came at a time of deep crisis for the papacy and the Church. The sojourn at Avignon was deepening into a lengthening absence from Rome and, indeed, Italy. A raft of problems intensified during John's pontificate. Most profound was the dispute over apostolic poverty, notably between the papacy and the Spiritual Franciscans. John's role in this is notorious, culminating in his condemnation of the doctrine of the absolute poverty of Christ as heresy. William of Ockham, in contrast, became convinced that a heretic was actually sitting on the throne of St Peter. This dispute raised the most fundamental questions concerning the nature of the Church and the conduct of the Christian life. Ironically, John himself was accused of heresy by his opponents, having given them ammunition through his idiosyncratic views on the beatific vision.

At the high political level, John was immersed in a bitter and prolonged dispute with the German ruler, Lewis iv of Bavaria, refusing to recognise him as emperor. The result was an imperial invasion of Italy between 1327 and 1330. John himself wasted huge sums of money in ineffective warfare to win back the papal states. Against the background of this dispute, Marsilius of Padua, in his Defensor pacis (1324), was able to claim that it was the papacy itself which was destroying the peace of Italy in particular.

John's reign was the classic example of the perils of appointing an older man to the papacy in the hope that he would not last long. He began his pontificate when he was seventy-two and having retained his vigour throughout died in his ninetieth year. Whatever the vicissitudes of his time in office, he consolidated the trend so noticeable in the Avignon period whereby the pope increasingly was able to impose a more and more centralised control over the ecclesiastical hierarchy – the lasting result of this period in the papacy's history.

By any standards, John's was a pontificate of great importance and it does remain strange that it has indeed been somewhat neglected by modern historians. Does this volume fulfil its claims to begin to put right that deficit? To a degree, but much more still needs to be done.

The volume is divided into four parts. The first concerns theological and philosophical concepts. Here there are contributions by Patrick Nold, William Duba and Frank Godthardt. The second section is concerned with the practice of power – administration and representation. There are papers by Melanie Brunner, Blake Beattie, Roberto Lambertini, Andreas Meyer, Kerstin Hitzbleck and Gottfried Kerscher. The subject of the third part is John xxii and European powers. The authors are Martin Kaufhold, Armand Jamme, Hans-Joachim Schmidt and Jens Röhrkasten. The final section is devoted to the writing of history and memory and it features Heike Mierau, Georg Modestin and Michail Bojcov.

It is impossible in a review of this kind to do justice to individual contributions. As the four parts suggest, a very wide range of topics of different kinds is addressed. Several of the contributions contain very detailed treatments of manuscripts which certainly adds to our knowledge. The political context of John's reign and his interactions with political actors is illuminated further – the scope is wide, including the Empire, Italy, Aragon and England. An amount of space is accorded to the poverty dispute but, I think, still more could have been given. Usefully, detailed attention is extended to the questions of bureaucracy and ecclesiastical appointments. How John was remembered is also a haunting question. He was, of course, a jurist who fancied himself as a theologian. It would have been informative to have been given more information about his contentious flights of fancy over the beatific vision.

In all, this is a useful volume which does materially enrich our knowledge of John xxii, the man who canonised Thomas Aquinas. But it only gives us the taste for more. A fresh major study devoted to his pontificate as a whole is certainly called for.