Satsuma @Satsuma@cat.family

@Lady haha yes that is an unfortunate byproduct of being a history major

@Lady its still bad form to not use the standard terminology in an introductory level textbook — like avignon papacy should be on the vocab list not omitted entirely (its self explanatory enough to be forgivable, but it makes me less willing to let the ambiguous language slide)

I also dislike textbook choice to list a whole bunch of historical critiques without confirming to the reader which are accurate / to what extent bc I feel that the reader will naturally assume they’re fact. I understand brevity is a challenge with these kind of texts but it still irritates me

I’m not like, pro Avignon but:
a) they aren’t *that* much worse than plenty of non-french popes, like there are plenty of 70 yr runs of shitty Roman popes
b) lets be honest the whole thing was at least 60% Rome being OUTRAGED that they weren’t being treated like they were the center of the world anymore and, smarting at the loss of social capital (as well as probably some literal capital, pilgrims were a lucrative business) deciding that obviously the popes MUST be puppets to the french king to decide to reside in France because there was no other possible reason a pope might voluntarily leave Rome

@Lady and then they go back to talking about french kings and I was just sitting there like ‘wait what the hell’

@Lady something along the lines of ‘[political setup] resulted in the papacy being moved to Avignon in 1309. The resulting period was called the Babylonian Captivity and was widely criticized for….’

@Lady it’s a short passage, so it only gets proper nouned once. But basically yeah

@Lady except its not the default term as far as i can tell — every other class i’ve taken uses Avignon Papacy in all the modern materials

@Lady I’m well aware of the history of the term which, which is why I think it’s an oddly political choice to use as the default term in a modern textbook

@Lady i mean yeah but like, it’s still weird to it the Babylonian Captivity without any qualification in a supposedly neutral source

This textbook is taking a weirdly strong stance against the Avignon papacy

@Lady ah i mean, i cant read qr codes so i dont really care