The word antipope is included in the basic vocabulary of every researcher of the Middle Ages. Ancient and vulgar, this term, nevertheless, hides an intellectual attitude replete with implications for the study of the past: it leads us to qualify and evaluate, in a frequently uncritical and hasty manner, the historical significance superceded by political conflicts and social relations decisive for the constitution of the Roman Church and Christianity. This article has a dual purpose: to debate the analytical relevance of this elementary concept and to examine an important reason for its unrestricted historiographical perpetuation. For this, we propose a text that investigates the difficult relationship existent between the term antipope and the complexity of medieval reality, and the links that bound its conceptual use to the social expectations and projections of the historians themselves.
Antipopes; Historiography; Memory; Pontifical History