Recensioni ly autocratic regime. It is interesting to see a similar perspective brought to the Roman court, where a monarchy of a different sort was equally tempered and balanced by factional intrigue. The reader of Court and Politics also encounters interstitial episodes in which the absence of the pope is the most compelling feature. Irene Fosi's chapter on the possesso ritual emphasizes the importance not of continuity between popes, but of discontinuity and novelty. Tensions from the

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... s papacy, she concludes, were quashed or at least masked beneath an image of the new pope's justice. On the other hand, when a pope removed himself from his civic and festive dutiesas Innocent XI did for reasons of piety in the 1680stensions quickly mounted to a boil. Renata Ago charts the escalating disputes between sacred and secular authorities during Innocent's retirement from public view, and the secular nobility's appropriation of the festive scene during the pope's absence. Statecraft and religion were at play here, since the pope's absence was not due to prudishness, but rather formed part of an agenda to encourage widespread moral reform in Rome.