In our latest piece of bonus content, writer Dr. Richard Abels travels back the late Medieval period with European religious history scholar Dr. Cecilia Gaposchkin to discuss the structure of the Catholic Church at the time, the legitmacy of power, and egos so big they change the world.

Dr. Cecilia Gaposchkin received her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2001. She works on late medieval cultural history, and has published on the crusades, on the Capetians (the kings of France between 987 and 1328), on kingship, and on liturgy. Her most recent book is Vexilla Regis: Liturgy and Relics at the Sainte Chapelle in the Thirteenth Century  (CNRS: 2022).  She is also the author of Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology  (Cornell UP, 2017), The Making of Saint Louis (IX) of France: Kingship, Sanctity and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (Cornell UP, 2008), Blessed Louis, The Most Glorious of Kings: Texts relating to the Cult of Saint Louis of France (Notre Dame: 2012; translations done with Phyllis Katz), and, with Sean Field and Larry Field, The Sanctity of Louis IX: Early Lives of Saint Louis by Geoffrey of Beaulieu and William of Chartres (Cornell UP: 2014), and The Deeds of Philip Augustus : An English Translation of Rigord's "Gesta Phillipi Augusti" (Cornell UP: 2022). She is now working on a study of liturgy and ceremony in thirteenth-century Paris, and another on the long history of the Cross Invincible.

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