What is the theory of conciliarism?

conciliarism, in the Roman Catholic church, a theory that a general council of the church has greater authority than the pope and may, if necessary, depose him . Conciliarism had its roots in discussions of 12th- and 13th-century canonists who were attempting to set juridical limitations on the power of the papacy.

What is the historical significance of conciliarism?

Conciliarism was a reform movement in the 14th-, 15th- and 16th-century Catholic Church which held that supreme authority in the Church resided with an ecumenical council, apart from, or even against, the pope . The movement emerged in response to the Western Schism between rival popes in Rome and Avignon.

What were the causes of the conciliar movement?

Its original purpose was to heal the papal schism caused by there being two, and later three, popes at the same time (see antipope). The movement was successful, deposing or accepting the resignation of the popes concerned.

What is the conciliar system of government?

The conciliar movement of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries was an attempt to modify and limit papal control over the Church by means of general councils.

Was the conciliar movement successful?

The end result was that the conciliar movement solved the problem of the papal schism but then faded into obscurity from that time forward . Popes would continue to call councils to meet at the pope's command in the Western church up to the present day.

What role did the conciliar movement play?

The conciliar movement called for more authority to be given to Church councils so that the Church was not dependent upon the pope . The Church had seen with its own eyes the downward spirals of corruption that had accompanied the Papacy and that they resulted in the Great Schism.

When was conciliarism definitively defeated?

When was conciliarism definitively defeated? In 1439 in Ferrara-Florence.

Why was the Council of Constance important?

The council's main purpose was to end the Papal schism which had resulted from the confusion following the Avignon Papacy.

What is the theory of the polyphonic organization?

The polyphonic organisation is simultaneously linked to many function systems . In effect, organisations are now pervaded by numerous incomparable values and communicative codes, and one of the main managerial issues is the management of this heterogeneity.

What is a conciliar Catholic?

Essentially, 'Conciliarism' or the Conciliar Theory is the belief that a general council has authority over a pope . The 'foundations' of the movement have been traced back to speculations by thirteenth century canon lawyers.

"Anxieties of influence": Skinner, Figgis, conciliarism and early modern constitutionalism. (2024)

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If, as Harold Bloom claims, "strong" poets struggling toescape the long shadows cast by their powerful predecessors havecharacteristically been dogged by "anxieties of influence",(1)so too, of late, have historians of ideas and especially those whoaspire to contribute to the history of political thought. It is truethat literary theorists of more Francophone sympathies thanBloom's, people long since attuned to the ceaseless murmur of theinfinite text, have evinced no such apprehensions. For them, instead,the traditional scholarly preoccupation with identifying the influencesat work on a text involves altogether too constricting an effort atnarrow contextualization. Happily adrift themselves on "thecommunal sea of linguicity",(2) they see such an effort as missingthe crucialfact that a text is itself heterotextual, cannot but be a potpourri of traces, "a tissue of quotations drawn from theinnumerable centers of culture" -- in Roland Barthes's wordsagain, "a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings,none of them original, blend and clash".(3) But at the very momentwhen theorists of such stripe were bent on evoking the degree to whichthis very phenomenon of intertextuality transgresses and subverts thelimitations of context, the members of what is sometimes referred to as"the Cambridge School" among historians of political thoughtwere urging, to the contrary, that the challenge confronting theinterpreter is precisely that of limiting the context(4) and insistingthat the project of tracking influences had necessarily to be"irreducibly arbitrary". And not because it is too cautious,narrow or constricted in the method usually employed, but on thecontrary because it is altogether too vague, loose and sloppy.(5)

It is with the latter claim that I am concerned in this essay. Theproblems it raises are important ones; they are not casually to bedismissed by anyone concerned with the history of ideas in general orthe history of political thought in particular. And those problems canbest be explored, I believe, by an exercise which combines some generalmethodological reflection with an attempt to assess a specific case ofsome significance in which influence has been both alleged andcontested. In what follows, then, I propose to address myself to twomatters. First, to the recent body of methodological writing (much of itcritical) concerning the viability of the influence model as anexplanatory tactic in the history of ideas and the histories ofliterature and art. Secondly, to the validity of the long-standing claimthat the conciliar movement and conciliar ideas of the fifteenth centurylater exerted a demonstrable and important influence on the shaping ofearly modern political and constitutional thinking.

It was Quentin Skinner who, in three characteristically livelyarticles published in the mid-1960s, succeeded in generating the currentwave of anxiety among historians of political thought about theemployment (as, ironically, in this sentence!) of the influence model ofhistorical explanation, as well as a degree of timidity about the veryuse of the word "influence" itself, and a tendency, amongthose actually employing the model, to resort to clumsy circumlocutionsin order to avoid acknowledging that fact.(6) It was in the first ofthese articles that the attempt to trace influences was most sweepinglycondemned. If such affiliations are to be established, "theconnection has to be close enough to be separable from chance butsufficiently loose-limbed to be separable from causality"."The philosophical status of this activity . . . is by no means soself-evidently clear", the assumptions on which it depends arefrequently questionable, and the practical obstacles it encounters (notleast among them the lack of sufficient evidence to permit convincingcorroboration) are truly formidable. This is the case even when we havethe apparently independent corroboration constituted by an author'shimself claiming to have been influenced by another. For the validity ofthat claim, too, has itself to be established. The author in questionmay, after all, be lying, boasting, sheltering behind the authority of agreat name, trying to conceal his real sources, and so on.(7) And wherewe lack even the possibility of independent corroboration of that sort,we are in constant danger of supposing, when an argument in a later workcalls to mind a similar line of reasoning in an earlier one, that thelater writer was deliberately referring to the earlier one when what maybe involved is nothing but a random parallelism. In such matters, proofis stubbornly elusive. "The attempt to trace influences must beirreducibly arbitrary" (my emphasis), and "explanations inthis mode at best not evidently convincing and often evidentlyfalse"(8)

Given the scathing nature of his dismissal in the second of thesearticles of the use made by one respected literary scholar of theinfluence model,(9) it is noteworthy that in the third, published onlytwo years later, Skinner backed off a little from the sweeping,theoretically based nature of his earlier denunciations, conceding nowthat in his earlier "critique of the influence model I perhapsstressed too much the impossibility of making the model work, ratherthan its sheer elusiveness". That model, in fact, is "far frombeing empty of explanatory force". The problem with it is of apractical nature: "it can very rarely be made to work", and,"even when it can . . ., there is scarcely ever any point in doingso". As so often used in the past it has been based, indeed, on"nothing better than the capacity of the observer to foreshortenthe past by filling it with his own reminiscences". That being so,and in order to avoid the generation of "purely mythologicalexplanations", Skinner proposed three minimal "necessaryconditions" which would have to be met if we wanted "toexplain the appearance in any given writer B of any given doctrine, byinvoking the 'influence' of some earlier given writer,A". Namely, (i) that there should be the presence of "agenuine similarity between the doctrines of A and B"; (ii)"that B could not have found the relevant doctrine in any writerother than A"; (iii) "that the probability of the similaritybeing random should be very low". And he clearly inclined to theconclusion that investigations of influence in the history of ideas havecharacteristically failed to meet those conditions.(10)

So, too, did others who followed in his wake -- notably ConalCondren.(11) Condren, indeed, moved by the practical difficultiesattendant upon the employment of the influence model, and arguing that"anything influence can do, use can do better", urged thereplacement of "influence" with "usage". Usage,after all, "by being a general term with a multitude ofpossibilities" has, among other things, the advantage of inviting"immediate specification -- how and in what way and to what extentdid y in fact use x?"(12) But Skinner, in the only subsequentcomment of his on the matter of which I am aware, made no mention ofthis interesting suggestion. Instead, and having without any apologymade extensive (and very effective) use of the influence model in hisFoundations of Modern Political Thought,(13) he continued the process ofbacking away from his earlier strictures, and, by the unconscious ironyof an implicit invocation of the notion of influence, attributed his owninitial scepticism about "the use of the concept of`influence' in the history of ideas" to the impact on him ofPeter Laslett's scepticism about "the capacity ofHobbes's alleged influence to explain any features of Locke'sTwo Treatises".(14) Not altogether a satisfactory conclusion to thehue and cry of the two decades preceding, and for a more consistentdiscussion of the matter it is necessary to look in a somewhat differentdirection.

In one of his earlier discussions, Skinner had noted that, apartfrom some glancing remarks by Philip Wiener, he was unaware of anyprevious attempt to analyse the range of problems attaching to the useof the concept of influence.(15) But such discussions had, indeed,occurred -- quite singular in the case of Andre Gide in 1900, andadmittedly fragmentary in the case of Louis Cazamian in 1921 or R. G.Collingwood in 1945,(16) but becoming more thoroughgoing and widespreadin Comparative Literature circles as that field rose to prominenceduring the years after the Second World War.(17)

For those of us who have tracked the degree to which"anxieties of influence" have dogged historians of ideas overthe course of the past two decades, the nervousness and discontent withthe employment of the concept evident in these earlier discussions andunderlined by "the enclosure of the word `influence' withinguarded and ironic quotes"(18) will be all too familiar -- sofamiliar, indeed, as to threaten to conceal from us that somethingintriguingly different was going on. Whereas for Skinner it was theelusiveness, imprecision and lack of historicity in the way in which theinfluence model was characteristically employed that fuelled hisdiscontent with the model itself, for the students of comparativeliterature the source of discontent lay in an almost diametricallyopposed direction. For them, as they began to respond to the promptingsof structuralist modes of literary analysis or of the New Criticism andto give, accordingly, a higher priority to formal values and aestheticjudgement, it was the traditional domination of the discipline byhistorical concerns that itself stimulated their dismay. Or, moreprecisely, its domination by the type of literary history associatedquintessentially with the "French School" of comparatists.(19)This school, students of comparative literature -- in Europe and Asia aswell as in America(20) -- had increasingly come to view asoverwhelmingly positivistic, as labouring under "the dead hand ofnineteenth-century factualism, scientism, and historicalrelativism".(21) And its preoccupation with a typically mechanicaland externalistic investigation of sources and influences they saw as"springing from an essentially scientistic attempt" tounderstand the course of literary history as "a series of cause andeffect relationships".(22) In their reaction to this approach somewere led either to abandon the customary investigation of influences infavour of a probing of "tradition" or"development",(23) or, without rejecting it, to seek tosupplement it in order to take into account the broader phenomenon forwhich Julia Kristeva was later to propose the term"intertextuality".(24)

Most, however, at least at the time, appear to have been reluctantto go that far. As Haskell M. Block pointed out, their discontent withtraditional investigations of influence sprang not simply from abstractmethodological worries but also from the unsatisfactory, mechanical andeven trivial nature of so many of those studies.(25) They did notbelieve that literary studies could dispense entirely with the use ofthe influence model. Influence, after all, was "an intrinsic partof literary experience" and it was altogether "too valuable,too essential a notion to be discarded". The problem, rather, wasthat in the literary history of the older mould the concept of influencehad been "obliged to bear more than it [could] . . . properlybear". What it needed was sharpening, "redefinition", andemployment by literary historians in the future "with a preciseunderstanding of its scope and limits".(26)

It was with the specific objective of reaching such anunderstanding that Goran Hermeren, a Swedish philosopher, later pickedup on these discussions among the comparatists and, extending hisenquiry to embrace history of art as well as literature, embarked on theproject that was to eventuate in the longest, fullest, most intricateand certainly most relentless treatment of the issue available.(27)Noting that when one uses the word "influence" according"to the rules of ordinary English" one tends to be statingorimplying "a weak causal connection", he proceeded, unlikeSkinner, to treat influence statements as susceptible to analysis as"a particular kind of causal explanation".(28) But beyondindicating his awareness of the likelihood of disagreement on that pointand affirming his own sense that there are "good argumentssupporting the causal analysis of [human] action", he passed nojudgement on "the crucial distinction between reasons andcauses" and sidestepped the philosophical debate on the wholeissue.(29) Conscious of the degree to which "exaggeration and lackof subtlety" in investigations dating back to the earlier part ofthe century had "given the term 'influence research' abad connotation" in art history as well as literary studies,(30) itwas his primary concern to bring some precision to the whole effort, andto identify via a painstaking analysis of a myriad of examples drawnfrom both fields the problems it raises and the practical obstacles itencounters.

In so doing, he elaborated in intricate detail a set of somethirteen restrictions on "the family of concepts of influence"he proposed to examine,(31) and followed it up with a set of fivenecessary conditions "for artistic influence to have takenplace".(32) These overlap or link with Skinner's threenecessary conditions but do so in rather complex fashion. Thus whereasSkinner simply presupposed the temporal priority of the work doing theinfluencing to that influenced, Hermeren felt it necessary to spell itout explicitly, and in two different ways.(33) He similarly spelt outthe necessity for there having been direct or indirect contact betweenthe creator of the work influenced and the work influencing him,(34)folded in along with the stipulation of genuine similarity that of"systematic differences" in the case of negativeinfluence,(35) and appended the condition that the work influencedshould in the pertinent respects be discernibly different from what itwould have been had it not been influenced.(36)

All of which serves to underline the number of difficultiesinvolved at every stage even of the process of deciding whether thestipulated requirements and conditions have been met. But in common withBlock and the other comparatists discussed earlier, he came to theconclusion that "studies of influence can be worthwhile", that"hypotheses of influence can be corroborated" just as well,indeed, "as most other empirical hypotheses", that the valueof such hypotheses has to be assessed in terms of the significance oftheir "payoff", and that such (essentially historical)questions are not to be "decided by philosophers, at least not bythem alone".(37) Thus, despite their differing points of departure,there is in the end something of a convergence in the line of argumentpursued by Skinner and others sympathetic to his approach to the historyof political thought(38) and that pursued by scholars in comparativeliterature and art history who were likewise preoccupied with theinfluence problem. While undoubtedly sharpening a critical awareness ofthe pitfalls involved in the use of the influence model, thelong-drawn-out critique of that model appears to have eventuated in thesomewhat grudging concession that it is capable, after all, of yieldingworthwhile results, as also in the implicit recognition that in itsabsence it would be difficult to construct effectively explanatoryhistorical narratives. The proof of the pudding, it seems, is mostlikely to be found in the eating. With that in mind, then, it is timenow to address the specific case. And, as is only fitting, that case isone itself signalled by Skinner's own major contribution to theinterpretation of early modern political and constitutional thought.

In a review of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought JulianFranklin identifies as "the most general [if contestable] newinterpretation" in that book Skinner's location of "thedirect ancestors of the great resistance theorists of the 1570s in theconciliarist writers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenthcenturies",(39) with their remote ancestors, one should add, beingthe distinguished early fifteenth-century conciliarists Pierred'Ailly and Jean Gerson. Franklin is right to emphasize thisparticular interpretative move. It is a very important one andexceedingly well executed. Though the word itself is not used, itinvolves the deployment of nothing other than the influence model, thebold assertion that, strictly speaking, "no such entity" asthe "Calvinist theory of revolution exists". That is to say,that when the Calvinists of the late sixteenth century elaborated aconstitutionalist resistance theory (traditionally regarded asdistinctively Calvinist and as one of the "startling innovations ofsixteenthcentury political history"),(40) they were in fact doingnothing other than drawing upon "the existing theories ofrevolution [long before] developed by their Catholicadversaries".(41) The claim itself is striking enough, but withoutin any way wishing to diminish its importance as an interpretative move,it has to be insisted that Franklinis simply wrong to label it as"novel". That he can do so, indeed, is a jolting reminder ofthe fact that the traditional periodization of European history intoancient, medieval and modern, and the degree of mutually exclusivescholarly specialization it has helped sponsor, continue to exact anunacceptable historiographic toll.

Almost two hundred years ago now, when in his View of the State ofEurope during the Middle Ages the English historian Henry Hallam came towrite about the scandal occasioned during the Great Schism of the Westby the spectacle of three rival claimants obdurately contending for thepapal office, he interpreted the success of the Council of Constance inending the schism by the deposition in 1415 of the rival pontiffs as"a signal display of a new system . . . which I may venture to callthe whig principles of the catholic church". And the Constancedecrees Haec sancta (which provided the theoretical basis for such adeposing power by asserting the subordination under certain conditionsof pope to general council) and Freguens (which mandated for the futurethe assembly of such councils at frequent and regular intervals) --those decrees he went on to describe as "the great pillars of thatmoderate theory with respect to papal authority which [not only]distinguished the Gallican church, . . . [but] is embraced by almost alllaymen and the major part of ecclesiastics on this side of theAlps".(42)

Hallam wrote those words in 1816. When later in the century LordActon came to allude to the conciliar issue, what Hallam had seen as alive ecclesiological option for the Catholics of his day had become amatter of interest only to the archaeologists of defunct ideologies. ButActon, none the less, was clearly struck by the pertinence of conciliartheory to the history of secular political thought.(43) So, too, aroundthe same time, was Otto Gierke.(44) And, a few years later, Acton'sdistinguished pupil John Neville Figgis, in one of his brilliant seriesof Birkbeck Lectures at Cambridge, went on to urge very forcefully thesignificance of the role he took the conciliar movement to have playedin the history of European political and constitutional thinking.

That it should be cast in such a role at all is not to be taken forgranted. Conciliar theory, after all, was an ecclesiological doctrine.Its rise to prominence was occasioned by a crisis in the life of thechurch: the disputed papal election of 1378, the subsequent protractedschism, and the failure of repeated attempts to end it. Its immediateappeal sprang from the fact that it offered a way out of what had becomea scandalous impasse, for it was, in effect, a constitutionalist theory.At its heart lay the belief that the pope was not an absolute monarchbut rather in some sense a constitutional ruler, that he possessed amerely ministerial authority conferred upon him for the good of thechurch, that the final authority in the church (at least in certaincases) lay not with him but with the whole body of the faithful or withtheir representatives gathered in a general council. In response to thatbelief the Councils of Pisa (1409) and Constanee (1414-18) assembled toput an end to the schism, the conciliarists at the Council of Basel(1431-49) defied unsuccessfully the authority of a pope the validity ofwhose title was not in question, and the cardinals of the oppositionconvoked (May, 1511) the dissident and abortive assembly derided by thepapalists of the day as the conciliabulum of Pisa.

If conciliar theory was indeed a form of constitutionalism, it wasecclesiastical constitutionalism that was involved, and its claim to aplace in the history of political thought may not be immediatelyevident. But on this matter Figgis's opinions werecharacteristically robust. "Probably the most revolutionaryofficial document in the history of the world", he said:

is the decree of the Council of Constance [Haec sancta] assertingits

superiority to the Pope, and striving to turn into a tepidconstitutionalism

the Divine authority of a thousand years. The movement is theculmination

of medieval constitutionalism. It forms the watershed between themedieval

and the modern world.(45)

And why is this so? Because in the first place, the scandal of theGreat Schism had the effect of turning attention from the old familiardispute between the two powers, temporal and spiritual, and focusing itupon the nature of the church itself. Because in the second,"[s]peculation on the possible power of the Council, as the truedepositary of sovereignty within the Church, drove the [conciliar]thinkers to treat the Church definitely as one of a class, politicalsocieties".(46) Because, in the third, the conciliar theorists ofConstance:

appear to have discerned more clearly than their predecessors the

meaning of the constitutional experiments, which the last twocenturies had

seen in considerable profusion, to have thought out the principlesthat

underlay them, and based them upon reasoning that applied to allpolitical

societies; to have discerned that arguments applicable togovernments in

general could not be inapplicable to the Church. In a word, theyraised the

constitutionalism of the past three centuries to a higher power,expressed it

in a more universal form, and justified it on grounds of reason,policy and

Scripture.(47)

According, then, to Figgis, if the conciliar movement was moreproperly to be regarded as "medieval rather than modern inspirit", it was also to be regarded as "having helped forwardmodern constitutional tendencies". Why? Because it asserted"the principles which underlay acts like the deposing of Richard IIin a far more definite and conscious way than had yet been done"and stripped "the arguments for constitutional government . . . Ofall elements of the provincialism, which might have clung to them forlong, had they been concerned only with the internal arrangements of thenational States". Conciliar theorists expressed their principles"in a form in which they could readily be applied topolitics", and so applied they were. "Even [sixteenth-century]Huguenot writers like Du Plessis Mornay", said Figgis:

were not ashamed of using the doctrine of the Council'ssuperiority over the

Pope to prove their own doctrine of the supremacy of the estates,over the

king . . . Emperors might be the fathers of the Council [ofConstance], and

kings its nursing mothers, but the child they nurtured was

Constitutionalism, and its far-off legacy to our own day was"the glorious

revolution".(48)

Three main claims are made in this argument, claims that I willdistinguish one from another and take up separately. The first, that thesource of fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century conciliar theory is tobe found in the secular constitutional developments of the previouscenturies. The second, that conciliar theory exerted a demonstrableinfluence on the constitutionalists and resistance theorists of thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The third, that it did so (andherein lies its historical significance) because of the precision withwhich it discerned the theoretical principles underlying medievalconstitutionalism, the universality with which it formulated thoseprinciples, and the clarity and force with which it restated them. Andto say that was to say also that conciliar theory was not only anecclesiological option but also a political theory.

The evidence which Figgis actually adduced in support of theseassertions was, in fact, quite scanty.(49) None the less, his claimswere received enthusiastically in the inter-war years by a series ofwidely read historians of political thought -- from H. J. Laski,Figgis's pupil, to R. G. Gettell, R. H. Murray, Charles H. McIlwainand George H. Sabine.(50) But interest in conciliar theory at leastlanguished somewhat in the years after Figgis wrote, and it was only inthe years after the Second World War that concern with the subject beganto quicken again.(51) And when it did, the validity of his first claim-- which concerned the influence of earlier secular constitutionaldevelopments upon the formation of conciliar theory -- was brought intoquestion.

Figgis had made little effort to ground that claim, and one canonly assume that he was nudged into making it in part because of thefrequent use the conciliar theorists themselves made of analogies drawnfrom secular political and constitutional practice.(52) But while thepopularity of such analogies certainly lends powerful support to hisassertion that the conciliarists were viewing the church as "one ofa class, political societies", it does little or nothing to helpsubstantiate the claim that they developed these conciliar ideas on thebasis of secular models. Perhaps because of this E. F. Jacob, as longago in 1943, had begun to wonder about the widespread tendency to regardconciliar theory as simply a transference to the church of ideas ofsecular political origin.(53) And in 1955 Brian Tierney, pursuingsuggestions made over the years by Otto Gierke, Franz Bliemetzrieder, H.X. Arquilliere, Walter Ullmann and others, made the claim that conciliartheory, far from being a reaction against canonistic views or animportation of secular constitutionalist ideas on to ecclesiasticalsoil, was in fact the logical outgrowth of canonistic thought itself,reflecting a subtle and complex amalgam of older Decretist discussionsof the case of the heretical pope and the subsequent attempts ofgenerations of Decretalists to rationalize in terms of corporation lawthe structure of both the individual churches of Christendom and of theuniversal church itself. Side by side with "the familiar theory ofpapal sovereignty", he argued, "there had developed anothertheory", one that was "applied at first to single churches andthen at the beginning of the fourteenth century . . . to the RomanChurch and the Church as a whole". This theory stressed "thecorporate association of the members of a church" rather than the"rigorous subordination of all the members to a single head"as "the true principle of ecclesiastical unity". It"envisaged an exercise of corporate authority by the members of achurch even in the absence of an effective head", and in so doinglaid the essential foundations for the later development of conciliartheory.(54)

The case Tierney makes is at once both powerful and subtly nuancedand, despite the surfacing of some oblique scholarly grumbling,(55) Iwould judge that the great tide of literature on conciliar and relatedmatters that has been flowing during the forty years since he propoundedhis thesis has done nothing to shake it and a good deal to confirmit.(56)

As a result, Figgis's first influence claim falls victim toredundancy. It does so primarily as a result of the research of the pasthalf-century into the vast body of canonistic glosses to which Figgishimself had little access (many of those glosses, indeed, have still tobe edited). And it does so secondarily because the contemporaneousprogress in our knowledge of the full range of conciliar literature hasfamiliarized us with the extent to which tire conciliarists themselveswere consciously dependent on earlier canonistic formulations for theircentral commitments.(57)

The same cannot be said, however, of his second claim, thatpertaining to the subsequent influence of conciliar theory on theconstitutionalists and resistance theorists of the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries. It is true that interest in this historical issuehas been almost exclusively an Anglophone affair.(58) Nor should we missthe degree to which indifference to (or ignorance of) Figgis'sargument has persisted among historians. Pierre Mesnard, the Carlyles,J. W. Allen, Christopher Morris and, more recently, Julian Franklin --all of them, if they betray any consciousness at all of conciliarthinking, appear to have regarded it, in its sixteenth- no less than itsfifteenth-century expression, as irrelevant, strictly speaking, to thehistory of political thought.(59) None the less, during the years afterthe Second World War, when in conciliar studies attention shifted frommatters diplomatic and political to ecclesiological and doctrinalissues, the case Figgis had made drew renewed and sometimes vigoroussupport from a whole series of scholars interested in late medievalpolitical thought.(60) And, of course, with the publication in 1978 ofSkinner's Foundations of Modern Political Thought, a forcefulacknowledgement of the importance of the contributions made by conciliartheorists to early modern political thinking was, in effect,"mainstreamed" among historians of modern politicalthought.(61) It is time, then, to turn to the nature and accuracy of thecase being made.

III

That that case should need to be made at all, however, is not simplyto be taken for granted. And to say that is to insist also that in anyassessment of its strengths and weaknesses the appropriate point ofdeparture should be the sober recognition of the degree to which ourtraditional understanding of the nature and career of conciliarism wasshaped by the micropolitics of late nineteenth-century Catholichistoriography. As we have seen, it was still possible for an Englishcommentator like Hallam as late as the end of the Napoleonic era tospeak of "the whig principles" endorsed by the Council ofConstance, and to view the conciliarist position as having survivedsince then as a live ecclesiological option to which most northernEuropean Catholics subscribed. But in the wake of the ecclesiastical andtheological developments that culminated in 1870 in the First VaticanCouncil's definition of papal primacy and infallibility, all thatwas changed. Those definitions seemed to leave Catholic theologians withno alternative but to regard the conciliar theory as a dead issue, anecclesiological fossil, something lodged deep in the Lower Carboniferousof the dogmatic geology. More tellingly -- or, at least, more pertinentto the matter with which we are concerned -- it also seemed to leaveCatholic historians with little choice but to treat the conciliarmovement as nothing more than a revolutionary episode-in the life of thechurch. And, in striking degree, the historiographic tradition emergingfrom that realization has framed (and in some residual measure continuesto frame) the picture of the subject conveyed in our generalhistories.(62)

That historiographic tradition had its ultimate origins in thehistorical arguments hammered out by Juan de Torquemada in defence ofEugenius IV's cause during the Council of Basel and subsequentlyembedded in his great Summa de ecclesia (c. 1453). Those arguments werefurther developed and refined by Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, in theearly sixteenth century and put in canonical form a century later byRobert, Cardinal Bellarmine.(63) The conciliar movement was portrayed asan unfortunate aberration spawned by the crisis and confusion of theGreat Schism and brought to an end in the 1440s by the papal triumphover the conciliarist onslaught at Basel. And the ecclesiology on whichthe conciliarists had taken their stand came to be seen as an extremeposition with little or no basis in the orthodox doctrinal tradition,and, according to some, with suspect origins in the speculations ofthose dangerous fourteenth-century radicals, William of Ockham andMarsiglio of Padua. Pius II's bull Execrabilis has clearlyproscribed it in 1460, and in 1516 the Fifth Lateran Council'sdecree Pastor aeternus banished it definitively into the outer darknessof heterodoxy. That being so, and even with due recognition accorded tothe twilight existence conciliar theory continued to enjoy in Gallicanpropaganda, it is understandable that something of a burden of proofshould have come to rest on the shoulders of anyone wishing to claimthat the continuing memory of the fifteenth-century councils and thecontinuing availability of conciliarist writings were such even in thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries as to have made it possible forconciliar theories to play a role in the shaping of constitutionalistand political thinking.

The post-war blossoming of conciliar studies, however, has lessenedthat burden considerably. If as part of that development it was thecontribution above all of Tierney to have made it abundantly clear thatthe conciliar theory was neither as recent nor as revolutionary in itsorigins as it formerly was customary to believe, it was likewise theachievement especially of Hubert Jedin, Josef Klotzner, Olivier de laBrosse, Remigius Baumer and Hans-Jurgen Becker to have established thefact that the demise of that theory in the years after the dissolutionof Basel was neither as rapid nor as final as we once were led toassume.(64) Similarly, and more recently, Hans Schneider and HermannJosef Sieben have focused renewed attention on the long and unexpectedlyvital "half-life"that conciliarist views continued to enjoy(and not only in Gallican France) for two centuries and more after thegreat changes wrought by the Council of Trent.(65)

It is now clear, certainly, that we can no more take for grantedthe weakening of the conciliarist impulse in the late fifteenth andearly sixteenth centuries than could the popes of the period. It maywell be that it is only our familiarity with the papalist outcome thatsuggests the necessity of the process. Without the marked persistence ofecclesiological tensions into the Age of Reformation it would be hard,for example, to explain the failure of the Council of Trent, despite thechallenges laid down by the novel Protestant ecclesiologies of the day,to promulgate any decree on the nature of the Christian church.Execrabilis, we now know, was viewed less in its own day as anauthoritative pronouncement than as a statement of the views of oneparticular faction; in the older histories it was clearly accorded amuch exaggerated significance.(66) Similarly, the crucial phrases of the1516 decree Pastor aeternus are simply too restricted in meaning toconstitute any unambiguous condemnation of conciliar theory.(67) Nosurprise, then, should be occasioned by the vigorous reassertion ofconciliarist principles in the early sixteenth century by such Parisiantheologians as John Mair (d. 1550) and Jacques Almain (d. 1515) -- thethinkers on whose closely affiliated constitutionalist theories ofresistance Skinner has rightly placed so much emphasis. Nor, similarly,should we be surprised by the degree of acquaintance Luther -- or, forthat matter, Bullinger -- showed with sonciliar views,(68) or by theefforts in Germany of Ortwin Gratius on the very eve of Trent to makethe history of the fifteenth-century councils and the writings of someof the leading conciliarists readily available in new editions,(69) orby the fact that the Scottish Calvinist George Buchanan (like John Knox,a former pupil of John Mair's) later confessed to having heldconciliarist ideas in his own younger Catholic days.(70)

France, Germany, Scotland, Poland, Italy even(71) -- in all of themthe conciliarist tradition endured on through the late fifteenth andsixteenth centuries, and though in his recent account Sieben oddly doesnot dwell on the fact,(72) it was in marked degree revitalized duringthe first two decades of the seventeenth century. The Europe-wideideological warfare of those years concerning the indirect power of thepapacy in matters temporal has not received the attention it deservesand still awaits its historian.(73) That warfare was occasioned inEngland by the discovery in 1605-6 of the Gunpowder Plot and thesubsequent Oath of Allegiance controversy, in Venice in 1606 by thepapal imposition of an interdict, in France in 1610 by the assassinationof Henri IV at the hands of a Catholic and by the subsequent attempt ofthe Estates General to impose on churchmen, royal officials and othersan oath which its opponenis portrayed as modelled on the earlier EnglishOath of Allegiance. Enough is known about this period of ideologicalturbulence to make it clear that it led to enhanced access to, increasedcirculation of, and renewed acquaintance with the history of thefifteenth-century councils and the writings of conciliarist authors.Here it must suffice to note that it was in the context of these eventsthat Edmond Richer, syndic of the Sorbonne, published in 1606 hisimportant new edition of the works of Jean Gerson, which madesonveniently available, not only Gerson's own conciliarist tracts,but also the most important of Pierre d'Ailly's, along withthose of their sixteenth-century successors Mair and Almain.(74) Onlyfive years after the appearance of Richer's edition, moreover, andas the controversy over the indirect power continued to unfold, theCalvinist author Melchior Goldast published the first volume of hisenormous three-volume Monarchia S. Romani Imperii, which included, alongwith William of Ockham's Dialogus and a host of other works, Johnof Paris's proto-conciliarist Tractatus de regia poiestate etpapali (1302), several of Gerson's, Gregor Heimburg's,Matthias Doering's, Philippus Decius's and JacquesAlmain's conciliar tracts, Richer's De ecclesiastica etpolitica potestate (1611) with its own reaffirmation of conciliartheory, and Latin versions of several Venetian efforts to vindicate therepublic against papal condemnation, including Paolo Sarpi'sConsiderazioni sopra le censure della santitd di papa Paulo V contra laSerenissima Republica di Venetia (1606) and the Trattatodell'interdetto della santitd di papa Paolo V (1606). This lastwork, signed by seven prominent Venetian clerics (Sarpi included) butapparently written in toto by Sarpi himself, characteristically invokedthe authority of the Councils of Constance and Basel and theconciliarist writings of Gerson, Almain and Mair.(75) In the earlysixteenth century, both of these men had insisted that ever since theCouncil of Constance (and in this unlike the Thomists) the theologiansof Paris and France had commonly and continuously taught thejurisdictional superiority of council to pope and its concomitantprerogative of limiting the pope's power and submitting him to itsown judgement.(76) In 1606 Paolo Sarpi, having evoked Mair'sauthority to the same effect, argued with reference to the conciliaristposition (and in the teeth of Cardinal Bellarmine's papalistdenials) that "an opinion which hath the consent of as many, if nota greater number of Universities, Countries and Kingdoms, cannot be saidto be mayntained without reason and authoritie nor yetaudaciously".(77)

The opinion in question, of course, and one which Richer alsodefended with gusto and at length in his own contemporaneous response toBellarmine's criticism of Gerson, was that of the superiority ofcouncil to pope. The above passage is quoted from the Englishtranslation of Sarpi's Apologia which was printed in London withina year of its original publication in Italian.(78) And that fact mayitself serve to focus attention on the somewhat more novel point thatthe England of the (later) sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, howeverProtestant, does not appear to have been much less acquainted withconciliar theory and the history of conciliar practice than were theCatholic countries of the Continent.(79)

In the fifteenth century, it is true, England had produced noconciliar theorists of note and English prelates had not played aleading role at either Constance or Basel. It is readily understandable,as a result, that little attention has been paid to the conciliaristlegacy to the Tudor and Stuart period. But two developments served tofamiliarize generations of English people even prior to the Oath ofAllegiance controversy with the broad outlines of the conciliarexperience and, in the case of a learned Anglican controversialist likeMatthew Sutcliffe (1550?-1629), with a great deal more.(80) First,in theearly 1530s, Henry VIII's diplomatic flirtation with conciliaristideas during the complex negotiations with Rome concerning the marriagequestion. Secondly, in the latter half of the century, the inclusion ofmaterials on the history and ecclesiology of the fifteenth-centurycouncils in such widely disseminated works as Foxe's Book ofMartyrs (1563) and Thomas Bilson's The True Difference betweneChristian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (1583).(81) But it wasthe protracted Oath of Allegiance controversy, along with its Venetianand French counterparts which progressively converged on it, that hadthe effect of making people in England for much of the seventeenthcentury better acquainted with conciliar history and the writings of theconciliarists than at any previous time -- the fifteenth century, Iwould judge, not excluded.

That fact is clearly reflected in the degree to which the Englishand Scottish writers, Protestant no less than Catholic, who for onereason or another contributed to the controversy made the evocation ofthe conciliarist tradition their own. In this James I himself, who citesJohn of Paris and the conciliarist writings of Gerson, Mair and Almain(alluding also to the deposition of John XXIII at Constance and theattempted deposition of Julius II in 1511 at Pisa), was noexception.(82) In his eagerness to prove that those theologians,Catholic though they were, had denied to the pope any temporal authorityover kings and any right to depose them, he betrayed a certaininsensitivity to their broader constitutionalist proclivities. Thatinsensitivity was not missed by his opponent Jacques Davy, Cardinal duPerron, who was quick to point out that even the conciliaristtheologians whose authority James had invoked still believed the pope toretain the right to condemn kings who were guilty of heresy, and deniedhim the right of deposition simply because that right belonged to"the whole body of the Realme".(83) In so doing, du Perronemphasized the importance of Richer's recent edition of Gerson forits having gathered together and reprinted the pertinent works of thesetheologians. That edition, certainly, was clearly the source of many ofthe references to conciliarist writings made by English contributors tothe Oath of Allegiance controversy, and was presumably the edition whichJames I himself used and presented in 1612 to the university library atSt Andrews.(84) On occasion, it is also possible to identify otherroutes via which these Jacobean authors were acquiring their knowledgeof conciliarist thinking,(85) but the pertinent sources had by their daymultiplied to such an extent as to render such exercises inidentification redundant.

In one of his discussions of the influence model, Skinnerstipulates as a minimal precondition for its invocation the ability toproduce evidence to the effect that the person being influenced"really had or even could have had any access to [the] works"allegedly doing the influencing.(86) Enough has been said to demonstratethat that precondition represents no formidable challenge in thisparticular case. The less so, it should now be added, in that theconstitutionalist resistance theorists of the sixteenth century, whoseauthority was also to be invoked in the seventeenth by their Englishparliamentary successors, provided another (if indirect) mode of accessto conciliar theory, along with the example of its application to theworld of secular politics. As we shall see,(87) that was clear enough inthe case of the Calvinists among those sixteenth-century theorists. Andif there is no mention of conciliarism in the tracts of Rossaeus orBoucher, the leading resistance theorists of the French Catholic League,one should recognize that their alignment with Rome gave them everyincentive to conceal any indebtedness of that sort if it did, indeed,exist.(88)

Whatever the case, the silence of those Catholic monarchomachs onthat particular matter did not carry much weight with the royalist JohnMaxwell, bishop of Tuam, when he came in 1644 to launch a long endpowerful attack on those Jesuits and Puritans who "to depresseKinges averre, that all power is originally, radically and formallyinherent in the People or Communitie, and from thence is derived to theKinge".(89) That deplorable idea these Puritans ("ourRabbies" as he calls them) did not draw from "the soundProtestants of the Reformed Churches" but from such monarchomachsof the previous century as Boucher, Rossaeus and Hotman who, in turn,"borrowed" it (he charged) from "the pollutedcisterns" of "the Sorbonistes, and others of that kinde".And in making that charge, he cites the works of John of Paris, Williamof Ockham, Marsiglio of Padua, Jean Gerson and Jacques Almain.(90) Thesewere men who, he says:

to oppose the Pope his infallibilitie in judgement, his unlimitedpower,

and to subject him to a Councell, did dispute themselves almost outof

breath, to prove that potestas spiritualis summa was by Christfirst and

immediately given unitati, or communitati fidelium . . . [so that]in the

case that the power of the Church was abused to heresie ortyrannie, the Pope

was deposable (not onely censurable) by a Councell. This questionwas

acutely disputed before, about, and after the Councell ofConstance.(91)

I dwell on Maxwell more because of his vituperative esprit thanbecause there was anything really unusual about his attempt to discreditthe notion of popular sovereignty and to undercut the parliamentaryadvocacy of a right of legitimate resistance against tyranny by linkingthem damagingly with popery. "Jesuit" had become a useful"snarl-word" long before the end of the Elizabethan era,(92)and the coupling of Jesuit and Puritan as bedfellows in sedition hadbecome a cliche by the time James I himself lent it his royal authorityby dubbing Jesuits in 1609 as "nothing butPuritan-papists".(93) Even before the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 the"Romish schooles" had come to be viewed, in ThomasMorton's words, as "seminaries of rebellions".(94) But,as we have seen, the great Europe-wide ideological controversy pivotingon the English-Oath of Allegiance dispute helped stimulate a markedrevival of interest in conciliar theory and in the dramatic actionstaken two centuries earlier by the Councils of Pisa, Constance andBasel. As a result, one begins to encounter expressions of alarm fromstaunch royalists focused now specifically on the unhappy availabilityof the conciliar precedent of the trial and deposition of popes to thosebenighted contemporaries who wished to legitimate a right of resistanceagainst temporal rulers. Thus David Owen, writing in 1610 in a workappropriately entitled Herod and Pilate Reconciled, argued that the"politike Divines" of the day had "learned their error,of the power of States-men over Kings", thereby investing "thepeople and Nobles with the power over Kings, to dispose of theirkingdomes", from such papistical schoolmen as John of Paris,Jacques Almain and Marsiglio of Padua. And he went on to berate theCalvinists Theodore Beza and Lambert Daneau for endorsing the idea that"as a generall councell, is above the Pope, so the kingdome or thePeeres of the Land, are above the King".(95)

In committing themselves to that position Beza and Daneau had notstood alone. Indeed, they had been at one with most of the leadingProtestant advocates of resistance theory in the latter half of thesixteenth century, from John Ponet, exiled bishop of Winchester, writingin 1556 during the reign of Mary Tudor, to George Buchanan writing in1567, to the authors of the Vindiciae contra tyrannos and the Discourspolitique who produced their statements during the French Religious Warsin the wake of the massacre of St Bartholomew's Day.(96) All ofthese men -- Ponet, Buchanan and DuPlessis Mornay at considerable length-- had adduced conciliar theory and practice in order to argue (in thewords of the Vindiciae) that if the general council can depose the pope,who regards himself "as much in dignity above the Emperor as theSun is above the Moon", then "who will make any doubt orquestion, that the general Assembly of the Estates of any Kingdom, whoare the representative body thereof, may not only degrade anddisthronize a Tyrant, but also disthronize and depose a King, vvhoseweakness and folly is hurtful or pernicious to the State".(97)

It is not surprising, then, that four years after the appearance ofwhose book, and in the process of writing against Cardinal Bellarmine anenormous treatise on the power of the pope in matters temporal (onepunctuated with quotations from such proto-conciliarists orconciliarists as John of Paris, Ockham, Pierre d'Ailly, Gerson,Dietrich of Niem, Zabarella, Nicholas of Cusa, Panormitanus, AeneasSylvius Piccolomini, Almain and John Mair) -- it is not surprising thatJohn Buckeridge, future bishop of Ely, felt it necessary to challengethe very pertinence of the conciliar analogy by insisting that accordingto "many theologians of great name . . . the ecumenical council issaid to have greater authority over a pope than the people is said tohave over a prince" (my emphasis). For whereas the pope'sposition is founded in grace, the king's is founded in nature. Andwhereas the pope can be called before a tribunal in which he can"without doubt" be deposed, "no one", the peoplebeing inferior to him, "can judge, punish or depose aking".(98)

Thirty years later, during the first Civil War, John Bramhall,subsequently archbishop of Armagh, reacting as had Owen to Beza'sinvocation of the conciliar analogy, made a similar attempt toneutralize its force by conceding the council's power of depositionwhile at the same time noting that it pertained to an elected ratherthan a hereditary ruler arrd that it was "grounded in a known[canon] law". "The king's crown", he insisted,"sits closer, the Council's power is greater, the like law iswanting".(99) And around the same time another royalist, HenryFerne, later to become bishop of Chester, accusing his parliamentaryopponents of Jesuitical practice and of borrowing their arguments from"the Romane Schools", derided them for harbouring silentthoughts of parliamentary infallibility and for being willing toattribute a binding force to the decrees of a parliament acting in theabsence of the king on the grounds that "[s]uch a power of bindingha's a generall Councell [of the church] to it's decisions,and why should a Civill Generall Councell of England [i.e., theparliament] have lesse power in it".(100)

But such royalist counter-attacks were launched in vain. Even afterthe Oath of Allegiance controversy had died down, familiarity with theconciliarist literature and with the actions of the fifteenth-centurycouncils in judging and deposing popes was such that when in April/May1628 "parliamentary proceedings came [for the first time in thatera] to be dominated by a contest between King and Commons about thenature and limits of supreme authority", it was natural for SirDudley Digges (the elder) to reach in debate for a comparison betweentheir own concerns and those of their conciliar predecessors. Just asthe Fathers assembled at the Council of Basel, he said, had debated"whether the Pope be above the church or the church above the Pope,so now is there a doubt whether the law be above the King or the Kingabove the law".(101) If the successive editions of Foxe's Bookof Martyrs, with its lengthy extracts from Aeneas SylviusPiccolomini's De gestis concilii Basiliensis commentariorum libriII, can only have reinforced that familiarity,(102) the Englishtranslations of the Vindiciae (which appeared in 1622, 1631, 1648 and1689), and reissues of Ponet's Shorte Treatise of Politicke Power(which appeared in the critical years of 1639 and 1642) served to drawattention to the pertinence of the conciliar precedent to theconstitutional dilemma with which the mid-century parliamentarians werenow confronted.(103) So, too, did the continued circulation ofBuchanan's De jure regni apud Scotos, the persistent notoriety ofwhich is evidenced by its targetting for government condemnation in1584, 1660, 1664 and 1688 and by its inclusion among the works condemnedby the University of Oxford in 1683.(104)

Thus William Prynne, who made extensive use of the arguments ofPonet, the Vindiciae, Buchanan and the Scottish conciliarist John Mair,repeatedly evoked the example of conciliar jurisdictional superiorityset by the Councils of Pisa, Constance and Basel and even by theconciliabulum of Pisa in 1511.(105) And he also cited at length AeneasSylvius's rendition of a speech delivered in 1431 during thedebates at Basel. In that speech the bishop of Burgos, ambassador of theking of Castile, in his attempt to make the case for the superiority ofcouncil to pope had appealed to a secular analogy which he clearlyassumed would strike his listeners as obvious. "The Pope", hesaid:

is in the Church as a King is in his Kingdome, and for a King to beof more

authority than his Kingdome, it were too absurd. Ergo. Neitherought the Pope

to be above the Church . . . And like as oftentimes Kings, whichdoe wickedly

governe the commonwealthe and expresse cruelty, are deprived oftheir

Kingdoms; even so it is not to be doubted but that the Bishop ofRome may be

deposed by the Church, that is to say, by the generall Councell . ..(106)

The English translation of the speech which Prynne is citing is thecontemporary one printed in Foxe's Book of Martyrs,(107) and itsappeal to English parliamentarians (at a time when belief in thesubordination of king to kingdom had long since lost its status as asimple matter of common sense) is reflected in the fact that the samelengthy quotation drawn from the same source had been prominentlyfeatured a year earlier in William Bridge's rebuttal of one ofHenry Ferne's royalist tracts. Bridge also made considerable use ofthe conciliarist writings of Jacques Almain, and the latter'sauthority is further evoked, along with that of Ockham, Gerson and Mair,in Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex, a work written in 1644 by way ofresponse to Maxwell's Sacro-sancta regum majestas.(108)

Clearly, then, Figgis was correct in his claim that conciliartheory exerted a demonstrable influence upon the constitutional andresistance theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If,after the onset of the Reformation, the Catholics among them were rarelyexplicit enough on the matter to warrant anything more than the cautiousnoting of parallels and similarities, with the Protestants we are on afirmer ground. Encouraged by the frequency of direct citation ofconciliar authors or the conciliar experience, and guided by thecorroboration of independent (if frequently hostile) contemporarywitnesses, the historian has in this case no reason whatsoever to betrayany squeamishness about invoking the influence model. As Skinner rightlyobserved in relation to one strand in the sixteenth-century phase of thestory, "when the Calvinist George Buchanan stated for the firsttime on behalf of the Reformed Churches a fully secularized and populisttheory of political resistance, he was largely restating a positionalready attained by the Catholic John Mair in his teaching at theSorbonne over half a century before".(109) And as Zofia Rueger putit in relation specifically to seventeenth-century England, "theconciliar precedent was deemed of sufficient importance and relevance tobe invoked frequently enough to force the Royalist writers into apolemic", forming, as a result, "a distinct strand of thecontroversy over the right of resistance in the years1642-1644".(110)

If, then, it may conceivably be stating the case a little tooebulliently to claim, as did Laski, that "the road from Constanceto 1688 was a direct one", (111) one san speak with some confidenceat least of a path from Constance to 1644, and probably, in fact, forsome way beyond. Scholars will doubtless disagree about how substantialin individual cases this conciliar legacy was,(112) but they willcertainly not be warranted in ignoring it, still less in questioning itsexistence. At the same time, it should be noted that at least in thisparticular test case Condren's recommended term"use"(113) catches what was going on rather more effectivelythan the vaguer term "influence". And it may have the addedadvantage of prompting us, when we are inclined to claim that A was"influenced" by B or "borrowed" from B, to go on (asCollingwood recommended) and ask ourselves "what there was in Athat laid itself open to B's influence, or what there was in A thatmade it capable of borrowing from B".(114) In effect, it mayencourage us not to rest on a simple assertion that influence hasoccurred, but to go on to ask the further and more probing "sowhat?" question, and, as a result, to give reasons for our beliefthat the fact of influence is, in a given instance, noteworthy,significant, possessed of a measure of explanatory power. And thatbrings us, of course, to Figgis's third and most importantinfluence claim, which concerned the very status and significance ofconciliar theory in the history of political thought.

In this connection, Figgis claimed, it will be recalled, thatconciliar theory exerted the subsequent influence it did (or, translatedinto Condren's terminology of usage, lent itself to the subsequentuse it received) precisely because of its intrinsic nature, because ofthe universality and force with which it advanced what was not only anecclesiological option but, beyond that, a political theory. In thisconnection, too, notice should be taken of some pertinent reservationswhich historians have expressed (though net necessarily with explicitreference to Figgis) about the failure of the conciliarists to translatetheory into practice, about the coherence and universality of theirtheoretical position itself, and about the degree to which the earlymodern constitutionalists who appealed to it in support of their ownclaims did so selectively and without an historically accurateunderstanding of the position itself.

Thus, thirty years ago, while conceding that conciliarism was"indubitably" a "political doctrine", that it was a"ruthless" application of what he called "the ascendingtheory of government" (that is, popular sovereignty) to the onebody "which at first sight would have seemed immune" to it,Walter Ullmann expressed grays doubts about the degree to which theconciliarists had really acted on their principles. By their deeds, heimplied, ye shall know them. The old Romano-canonical principle "`What touches all, must be approved by all' was a persuasivepolitical slogan, but one missed its appearance in practice".Constance and Basel were "as heretofore" merely"ecclesiastical assemblies" dominated, moreover, by the higherclergy. "The lower clergy and the educated layman", he argues,"were . . . knocking at the gate, and were refused entry":

Laymen indeed could submit memoranda, reports, make speeches andtake part

in the council's debates, but they were not allowed to voteexcept in so

far as they were delegates of Kings who were not of course merelylaymen; in

so far the old theocratic-descending point of View was applied once

again.(115)

Or as J. B. Morrall had put it when expressing similar sentiments afew years earlier, the early fifteenth-century conciliar thinkers"were all strict believers in clerical monopoly of churchgovernment", and the conciliar theory itself was "stillinseparably wedded to the orthodox hierarchical conception of authorityas coming from above rather than below". As a result, "all theingenuity of thinkers even of Gerson's calibre could not give therepresentative principle, based essentially on delegation from below,its full expression".(116)

It would be easy enough to take exception to this assessment of thefifteenth-century councils. At Basel, voting rights were extended inunprecedented degree to members of the lower clergy and it isimplausible to dismiss the grant of a vote to lay ambassadors simply asan acknowledgment of the allegedly clerical status of their royal orprincely masters. But Ullmann's remarks and those of Morrall wereaddressed to the theoretical formulations of the conciliarists and notmerely to their alleged failure to translate theory into practice. Thatlag in practice, they implied, was but the reflection of the internalincoherence of the theory itself. The conciliarists were unable fully toescape the gravitational attraction of "the oldtheocratic-descending point of view". What they did, Ullmannclaimed "was to refurbish the old episcopalist system under thecover of a progressive movement: stripped of its inessentialparaphernalia, conciliarism was a late medieval revival ofepiscopalism".(117) That being so, and given what Morrall called"the ambiguity inherent in the whole conciliar position",(118)its place likewise in the history of political thought ran only be anambiguous one. Nor should the eagerness of the early modernconstitutionalists and resistance theorists to evoke the conciliarprecedent encourage us to overlook that fact. Conciliarist ideas maywell have influenced such theorists but the latter, Ullmann insisted,did not swallow their conciliarism whole. Instead, they selected fromamong the conciliar materials handed down to them and chose to emphasize"only one strand of conciliarist thought".(119) And even then,if a forceful argument recently advanced by Cary J. Nederman is correct,they read those selected materials anachronistically, reinterpretingthem "selectively and in accordance with their own particularproblems and assumptions".(120)

The issues these criticisms raise are exceedingly intricate. Asthey clearly impinge directly on Figgis's third influence claim,they render the assessment of its validity a rather more complicatedaffair than that of the two preceding. Complex and taxing it may be, butnot impossible. And I would suggest that it can best be approached byposing four questions.

First, did the restriction on voting rights at thefifteenth-century councils really witness to some fundamental ambiguityin conciliar theory itself, signalling that what the conciliarists wereengaged in was nothing more, in essence, than a "revival ofepiscopalism"? Secondly, what aspects of conciliar theorizing andpractice we-e the seventeenth-century parliamentarians or, for thatmatter, their sixteenth-century monarchomach predecessors invoking?Thirdly, why was it, after all, if the conciliar precedent wasunhelpfully ambiguous, that they insisted on flourishing it, knowing (asthey had to) that it could expose them also to the damaging charge ofcrypto-popery? Fourthly, in evoking the conciliar experience andexploiting the ideas of the conciliarists was their understandinghistorically accurate, or were they reading those theoristsanachronistically, reinterpreting their thinking "selectively"through the distorting lens interposed by their own later "problemsand assumptions"? I will address each of these questions in turn.

First, it should be noted that conciliar theory possessed nomonolithic unity.(121) It is embedded in a vast body of writing producedunder differing circ*mstances (political and diplomatic as well asstrictly ecclesiastical), across a period stretching from the earlyfourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries, by authors representingseveral different vocations (theologian, canonist, curial official) and,when they made their particular conciliarist pronouncements, serving indiffering capacities (cardinals, bishops, representatives of princes,kings, universities and religious orders). Even if we limit ourselves tothe Parisian conciliarists on whom Skinner concentrates and whose namescrop up so frequently in the works of the seventeenth-century Englishcontroversialists, we will encounter important shades of difference intheir respective positions. The matter of voting rights affords a goodillustration of that fact. Thus whereas Mair does not discuss votingrights and makes no mention of lay representation in generalcouncils,(122) d'Ailly, Gerson and Almain do both. But while Gersoninsists that the right to vote be enjoyed by the lower clergy as well asby the bishops and that no member of the faithful be refused a hearing,he is willing to see the laity restricted to a merely consultative oradvisory capacity -- though it is important to note that he sees nothingpermanent or necessary about such a restriction.(123) Almain follows himfaithfully in this,(124) but dAilly is a good deal more forthcoming.Though the unlearned and those of the lowest ranks are not specificallysummoned to the council, no Catholic, he insists, should be excluded.Nor should kings, princes, or their representatives be denied a vote,any more than should doctors of theology or of canon or civil law, forthey are all men with authority over the people. (125)

The selective procedures suggested here are by no means democratic,but it would sure y be anachronistic to expect them to be so. If that iswhat Morrall means when he speaks of giving the representative principleits "full expression" (and his comparison with the make-up ofthe House of Commons prior to the Great Reform Bill of 1832 suggeststhat it is),(126) then the conciliar theorists undoubtedly fall short ofthe mark. But then so too' of course, would the Estates insixteenth-century France and the parliament in seventeenth-centuryEngland. As d'Ailly put it, "what touches all must be approvedby all, or at least by many and the more notable ones".(127) Anaristocratic principle of selection is clearly at work, but theimportant thing to recognize is that it is not predicated upon thepossession of hierarchical powers of a sacerdotal nature. That is thefactor fundamental to any episcopalist position, but clearly not the oned'Ailly has in mind, for he pointedly insists that doctors oftheology or of either of the two laws have greater authority over theChristian people and, therefore, a better claim to the vote thanignorant or merely titular bishops or archbishops.(128)

Secondly, and as we have argued, during the late sixteenth and muchof the seventeenth century English people had become better acquaintedwith the history of the fifteenth-century councils and the writings ofthe conciliarists than at any previous time -- the fifteenth century notexcluded. And they evoked that history and/or those writings for avariety of purposes: to document from unimpeachably Catholic testimoniesthe obvious corruption of the old church and the concomitant need forreform (thus Sir John Hayward and Richard Field); or triumphantly tounderscore the obvious contradictions and instability manifest in theCatholic doctrinal tradition (thus Bilson, Sutcliffe); or to debunk thenotion that a pontiff who was himself capable of heresy and subject tojudgement and deposition could plausibly lay claim to a power to judgekings and declare them deposed (thus Sheldon and James I himself); or,yet again -- and this time with a degree of genuine sympathy on the partof those of Calvinist as well as those of Catholic commitment -- to helpmake the case for an ecclesiology of episcopalist or conciliarinclination, or, alternatively, to strengthen the argument for anon-episcopal and synodal form of church government (thus WilliamWarmington, Roger Widdrington, Marc Antonio de Dominis, Robert Parkerand Samuel Rutherford).(129) With the exception, however, of SamuelRutherford, whose ecclesiological sympathies were of distinctlyconciliar bent,(130) the parliamentarians showed little interest in suchideological manoeuvres. Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, did they seek toexploit the quasioligarchic strand (with its evocation of the idea ofmixed government) that had been present already in the ecclesiology ofJohn of Paris, had found some resonance in Gerson's conciliarthought, and had been a prominent feature of the conciliarism ofd'Ailly, Zabarella end Nicholas of Cusa.(131) Instead, they focusedalmost exclusively on the precedent established by the central conciliarassertion of the ultimate jurisdictional superiority to the pope of thegeneral council acting as representative of the universal church, and onthe historic vindication of that superiority by the conciliar judgementand deposition of popes at Pisa, Constance and Basel.(132) And thatfact, that selectivity, speaks to our third question.

Neither the English, French and Scottish resistance theorists ofthe sixteenth century nor the English parliamentarians of theseventeenth appear to have found anything at all ambiguous about thecentral strand of conciliar thinking upon which they placed so muchemphasis. Nor did the French Huguenots appear to have lost any sleepover their indebtedness to scholastic predecessors for theirrevolutionary ideas. Quite the contrary, in fact. If Skinner is correct,they may even have seen it as a distinct advantage. For it helped themin their attempt "to neutralize as far as possible the hostileCatholic majority by showing them the extent to which revolutionarypolitical actions could be legitimated in terms of impeccably Catholicbeliefs".(133) That was far from being the case, of course, withtheir seventeenth-century English successors. "In Stuart Englandthere was much political capital to be made from convicting one'sopponents of popery",(134) and the sensitivity of theparliamentarians to the charge of cryptopopery and even more of Jesuitryis reflected in their anxious attempts to deflect its force. In relationto the despised doctrine of popular sovereignty Maxwell had charged that"Puritan and Jesuite in this, not only consent and concurre, butlike Herod and Pilate are reconciled to crucify the Lord'sanointed".(135) To that Rutherford hotly (if not very effectively)retorted that Maxwell, having taken "unlearned paines, to provethat Gerson, Occam, Jac[obus] safe Almaine, Parisian Doctors maintainedthese same grounds anent the peoples power over Kings in the case ofTyranny [as did the Jesuits]", had by so doing given "himselfethe lye" and inadvertently demonstrated that "we have not thisDoctrine from Jesuites".(136) But if not from Jesuits, clearlystill from papists. And that charge Bridge was forced to shrug off withthe rejoinder that "Reason is good wherever we finde it; neitherwould Abraham refuse the use of the Well because Abimeiech's menhad used it, no more will we refuse good reason, because Papists haveused it".(137) A reasonably robust stance, and it prompts me to askwhereof that "good reason" consisted.

In this connection, it is important to emphasize the degree towhich the seventeenth-century opponents of absolutism in Englandconfronted a new orthodoxy that had begun to establish itself,especially among Anglican churchmen, long before the end of theElizabethan era. Johan Sommerville has argued that when Richard Hookerin the 1590s had evoked the commonplace idea that the royal authorityflowed by natural law from the consent of the realm, "such ideaswere [in fact] already . . . going out of vogue among the higherclergy".(138) A new "divine-right" orthodoxy had begun todevelop which, despite that perhaps misleading label, continued thepractice of grounding governmental authority in the natural law ratherthan in the revealed word of God.(139) At the same time, however, itinserted a sharp distinction between the power of the king, which wasseen to be derived solely and directly from God, and his title, whichmight derive from designation by the people. In framing this type ofdesignation theory, Anglican divines had not hesitated to adduce by wayof analogy the fact that the pope claimed to hold his power immediatelyfrom God alone, even though as an individual he owed his title to ahuman electoral process. Thus William Barret in 1612, John Buckeridge in1614, Robert Bolton in 1639 -- this last insisting againstBellarmine's derivation of royal authority from the community that:

the question is not by what meanes, whether by hereditarysuccession or

election, or any other humane forme, a Prince comes into hiskingdome, but

whether by the ordinance of GOD we ought to obey him when he is

established . . . [T]he Pope is hoisted into his chaire ofpestilence, by

the election of the Cardinals or worse meanes, and vet that

hinders not our adversaries from holding it a divineordinance.(140)

This being so, and the opponents of the new orthodoxy in the periodleading up to the Civil War having lost, in effect, the ideologicalinitiative, many hesitated to claim in theory for a parliamentincreasingly bypassed in practice any unambiguous right of resistance tothe king, let alone a right of deposition.(141) Only the more robustamong those opponents were willing to push forward into whet had now, inthe past half-century, become more radical territory and to invokeagainst the king the inherent power of the community as wielded throughits representatives in parliament. And when they did, secular"parliamentary theory in the later Middle Ages" not having"kept abreast of practice" and "ecclesiasticalconciliarism . . . [having] . . . provided a general theory ofconstitutions for use by aspiring parliamentarians", it isunderstandable, as Antony Black has recently asserted, that some amongthem should "look back . . . on conciliarism as the closesthistorical precedent for what they were trying to do".(142) Butthat brings us to our fourth and final question: were theseparliamentarians (and their sixteenth-century predecessors), as Figgisbelieved, correct in their judgement about that precedent? Or were theyguilty, in effect, of understanding history anachronistically? And, ifthe latter, we of course as historians should know better than toindulge their distorted readings.

Given the range and complexity of the vast ocean of literature thatit is customary to label as conciliarist, the question may appear moreformidable than it in fact is. Central, after all, to the pertinence andforce of the conciliar analogy when evoked by constitutionalists,parliamentarians and advocates of legitimate resistance against kingsturned tyrant was the assumption that the church was, as Figgis put it,"one of a class, political societies", and that as a politicalcommunity it possessed by natural law the ultimate right (as, for thatmatter, did any natural body) to gather up its resources and exert itsinherent power to prevent its own ruin.(143) And although, as we havejust seen, they themselves could not on occasion resist the temptationto deploy the papal analogy for their own purposes, central to theresponse of the royalists was the insistence that the ecclesiasticalanalogy was invalid, because the papal monarchy was founded in grace notin nature, because it was elective not hereditary, and/or because thegeneral council by virtue of a known canon law possessed a greaterauthority over a pope than did the estates of any realm over their king.

Now it should be noted that this ideological stand-off is themirror-image of one that had occurred already during the conciliar epochitself. Embedded in the conciliarist literature are countless examplesand analogies drawn this time from the political arrangements of thesecular world,(144) invoked, of course, to help elaborate the case forthe supreme authority of the general council within the church. Themuch-cited speech of the bishop of Burgos at Basel in 1431 simplyrepresents a particularly striking example, and it should be noted thatthis conciliarist willingness to rely on secular analogies endured rightdown to the seventeenth century. Thus Mair and Almain in the earlysixteenth century, -who came close to treating the ecclesiastical andsecular polities univocally; thus Sir Thomas More in the 1530s, when heargued that "counsayles do represent the whole church . . . as aparliament represent the whole realme"; thus Paolo Sarpi in 1606,when, defending against Bellarmine's aspersions the orthodoxy ofGerson's conciliarist commitments (and following up on othersecular political analogies), he noted that it did not follow fromGod's having "placed a King to governe a Kingdome" thatthat king "is superior to his whol kingdom assembledtogether".(145)

Moreover, and as I have argued elsewhere,(146) the conciliaristswho had pursued that line of march had usually focused their attentionalso upon the sector wherein ecclesiastical power is at its closest, inquality if not in purpose, to secular governmental authority. When theyspoke of the church as the corpus Christi or corpus Christi mysticum,those expressions had lost for them the rich sacramental associationspresent in the earlier patristic usage and had acquired in their placecorporative and political connotations. Instead of the parallel beingdrawn with the sacramental body of Christ and corpus mysticum beingtaken to denote the incorporation of the faithful with Christ in amysterious community of salvation, the analogy was drawn now fromnatural bodies or bodies in general, and the expression taken to denotea "moral and political [as opposed to real or physical] body".Further than that, of the traditional categories of ecclesiasticalpower, it was not the power of order (potestas ordinis), the trulysacerdotal power, on which these conciliarists laid their stress. Thatpower, they said, pertained quintessentially to the Eucharist, whichthey designated not as the mystical but as the "true body ofChrist" (corpus Christi verum). Their own concern lay rather withjurisdiction (potestas jurisdictionis), for that was the power thatpertained to the corpus Christi mysticum, and especially with itspublic, coercive and unambiguously non-sacramental and politicalsubdivision--the potestas jurisdictionis in foro externo, whichd'Ailly referred to simply as "the governmental power"(potestas regiminis).(147) That was the modality of ecclesiastical powerthey had in mind when they made their case for the superiority ofcouncil over pope. And they grounded that case not simply in Scripture,or church history, or ecclesiastical custom, or canon law (though ofcourse they did all of those things), not simply, that is, in therights, privileges, customs, and laws proper to the communitas fidelium,but also in the mandates of the natural law itself, the law thatpertained to the community of mankind.

So far, so good. But, then, not all conciliarists framed their casein this way. A. J. Black, Joachim Stieber and, more recently, J. H.Burns have all stressed the complex interaction of ideology anddiplomacy that led in the 1430s and 1440s to a vigorous papalcounter-offensive involving the damaging portrayal of the Baselianconciliarist ecclesiology, and especially the version advocated by Johnof Segovia, as "constituting a subversive, even revolutionarychallenge to the very principle of monarchical authority . . . in thetemporal as well as in the spiritual realm". And, further thanthat, a counter-offensive "propagated, not only in the context oftheoretical discussion, but also, and even more vigorously, in seriousand energetic diplomatic efforts to establish a monarchical alliancewith temporal rulers against the radical attack".(148) Somewhatless emphasis has been placed, however, on the degree to which, partlyin response to that counteroffensive and in an attempt to deflect thecharge that the so-called "democratic" ideas of theconciliarists posed a threat to every form of monarchy, some of thoseconciliarists (Panormitamus, Andrew of Escobar, Thomas Strempinski and,above all, John of Segovia) were led to frame their conciliar theoriesin such a way as to render them less relevant, or even irrelevant, tomatters political. And in this they were followed in part by such earlysixteenth-century conciliar thinkers as Pierre Cordier in Paris andGiovanni Gozzadini in Italy.(149)

Indicative of this doctrinal shift is the fact that appeals tonatural law, though not entirely lacking, play a less crucial role inthe arguments of these Baselian conciliarists than in those of theirpredecessors and pertain often to issues of merely tributary mature.Similarly, the crucial distinction between the powers of order andjurisdiction is less insistently and less effectively evoked, even incontexts where it would have helped clarify and advance the line ofargument. The terms corpus mysticum and corpus politicum, instead ofbeing used in the earlier conciliarist fashion as synonyms, arecontrasted and employed in such a way as f O distinguish the universalchurch from all other communities in precisely those dimensions mostrelevant to the strict conciliar theory and to set it apart frompolitical societies in general. And the distinction now drawn betweenthe church as a "mystical" and as a "political" bodyis aligned with the familiar distinction between the whole membership ofthe universal church considered "collectively" and"distributively"--that is, as a single, corporate body and asa mere aggregation of individuals (omnes ut universitas / omnes utsinguli).

Thus, in formulations like that of John of Segovia (Black describesthem as constituting "the essence of BasleanConciliarism"),(150) the church assembled in general council wasidentified with the corpus mysticum and papal sovereignty seen incontrast as pertaining "to a somewhat lower, merely`political' order of things".(151) Parallels between churchand secular polity were to be admitted as valid only in so far as thechurch was itself regarded as a corpus politicum, a collection ofparticular churches and individual members ruled in accordance withhuman judgement and reason, the governance of which, like the governanceof any kingdom, God assists by a "general" rather than a"special influence". But the church congregated in a generalcouncil was to be regarded rather as a corpus mysticum animated andprotected by divine grace and not dependent on a merely naturaljudgement. As a result, it was precisely to the church as a mysticalbody directed by the Holy Spirit, as a unique community in which Christruled by a special and not merely general influence, that the Baselianarguments for the superiority of council to pope pertained.(152) Theirrelevance, then, to the mundane realm of secular principalities andpowers was understandably remote and had properly to be perceived assuch. And had the later constitutionalists and advocates of legitimateresistance to kings turned tyrant relied on these arguments they would,indeed, have been forced to place their emphasis on what was only onefacet of a complex and perhaps ambiguous position.

Whether, in invoking the conciliar analogy, they were or were notguilty of an anachronistic reading of the conciliar past depends, then,on the particular past they have in mind--on the specific strain ofconciliarism that informs their understanding of the fifteenth-centuryconciliar experience. With the monarchomachs of the sixteenth century,who refrained from citing individual conciliar thinkers, the question isnot readily susceptible of answer--though his teacher, John Mair, hadclearly had a hand in shaping Buchanan's political thinking and mayhave had some impact also on that of Ponet.(153) But with theirseventeenth-century English successors we are on much firmer ground. Therange of proto-conciliarist and conciliarist literature cited by theEnglish writers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries isadmittedly quite broad. Despite Foxe's inclusion, via histranslation of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, of one of John ofSegovia's speeches in his Book of Martyrs, I do not believe I havecome across a single reference to Segovia in the seventeenth-centurywriters, and references to Marsiglio of Padua, though by no meanslacking, do not appear with great frequency. One hears much more ofAeneas Sylvius, Dietrich of Niem, William of Ockham, Nicholas of Cusa,Panormitanus and Francesco Zabarella. But it is the members of the"School of Sorbonne" who top the list, from John of Paris, viad'Ailly and Gerson, to Almain and Mair. It is almost exclusivelyfrom these latter conciliarists, the so-called "Sorbonnists"or "divines of Paris", whose works Richer had recently madeconveniently available, that the mid-century parliamentarians areaccused by their royalist opponents of having drawn their benightedideas. And it is upon the authority of those particular conciliariststhat they themselves do in fact rely.

That being so, there was nothing anachronistic about theirconviction that the fifteenth-century conciliar experience represented avaluable historical precedent that could help advance the case forlegitimate resistance that they themselves were struggling to make. Thequestions which Collingwood viewed it as essential to answer ifassertions of historical influence were to reach beyond the superficialpose, in this case, no insurmountable obstacle. Figgis was correct,after all, in his claim that the Parisian conciliarists had given anotably universal expression to the principles underlying the medievalconstitutional tradition, and that that notably universal expression wasdestined to take on a heightened significance in a later era whenabsolute or quasi-absolute monarchy was coming to be regarded as theonly civilized form of government, when representative assemblies inmuch of Europe had entered upon a period of decline, and when suchtraditional medieval limitations on monarchical power were coming to bedismissed as "inefficient clogs upon the wheels ofgovernment", "not merely wrong but stupid".(154) As JohnPonet himself had pointed out, "by this lawe [of nature] andargumentes of the Cannonistes and example of deprivacion of a Pope areall clokes (wherewith Popes, bishoppes, priests, Kaisers and Kinges useto defend their iniquity) utterly taken away".(155)

Whatever its original intent, the phrase "epistemologicalhypochondria" (and I believe we owe it to Ernest Gellner) serveswell to catch the mood of uneasiness, hesitancy, cognitive timidityeven, characteristic of so much of our contemporary intellectualdiscourse, as also our concomitant reluctance as we go about ourintellectual endeavours even "faintly to trust the largerhope". As a subfield of one of the most central of humanisticdisciplines, history of ideas has not proved immune to this generalsyndrome. In its more traditional forms at least, it has been dismissedas "shopsoiled" and "simpleminded",(156) derided as"a kind of paper chase of ideas back through the ages . . . usuallyending up with Aristotle and Plato",(157) and, in what has been(improperly) represented as constituting its Lovejovian variant,condemned as resting "on a fundamental philosophicalmistake".(158) In comparison with such eye-catching frontalassaults, the nagging worries expressed in the past few years about theuse of the influence model in the history of political thought amount tono more than desultory skirmishes on the margins of the far-flungbattleground of cognition. And they are less likely, I would predict, toeventuate in any full-scale abandonment of the approach itself than toinduce a helpful intensification of the historian's methodologicalself-consciousness in pursuing it. When, as in the case-study concludedabove, the preconditions which Skinner and Hermeren properly stipulatecan indeed be met and adequate response made to the further questionswhich Collingwood had earlier posed, then the currently prevalent (andusually unexamined) squeamishness about the use of the influence modelshould be easy enough to overcome. On this matter, it is long since timefor historians to eschew cumbersome and uneasy circumlocutions (theyfool nobody anyway), and to liberate the word "influence"itself from the veritable embarrassment of quotation marks that has cometo surround it. However sloppily the influence concept may conceivablyhave been invoked in the past, it has (as it always has had) animportant and probably indispensable role to play in the history ofideas. It should be permitted to play it. (*) Much of the research forthis paper was completed at the Folger Shakespeare Library while I was aGuest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars,Washington, D.C., in 1994. I should like to express my gratitude to bothinstitutions for the privilege of being able to work in so stimulatingand supportive a setting, and to my fellow scholars at the WilsonCenter, especially Patricia Springborg and Frank Turner, for theircolleagueship and encouragement. For helpful suggestions I should likealso to thank George Pistorius and Mario Valdes, as well as mycolleagues at the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences,Williams College. (1) Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theoryof Poetry (New York, 1973). I borrow the title of this essay from thetitle and theme of Bloom's splendid book, though, by an appropriatemisprision, I use it to denote, not anxiety about the fact of influenceitself, but rather the anxiety currently generated among historians bythe very suggestion that one thinker may have influenced another. (2) Idraw this arresting phrase from Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intentionand Method (New York, 1975), p. 338. (3) The term"heterotextual" is Claudio Guillen's. Discussing JuliaKristeva's introduction of the term "intertextuality" todescribe the phenomenon in question, he says: "It might just aswell have been suggested that the text of a literary work isheterotextual, penetrated by alterity, by words other than itsown": Claudio Guillen, The Challenge of Comparative Literature,trans. Cola Franzen (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), p. 245. Or, as Kristevaherself put it, "Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations;any text is the absorption and transformation of another": see heressay "Word, Dialogue and Novel", in The Kristeva Reader, ed.Toril Moi (Oxford, 1986), p. 37. The essay was published originally in1966 as "Le mot, le dialogue et le roman". Roland Barthes,Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), pp. 146, 148,cited in Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism afterStructuralism (Ithaca, 1982), pp. 32-3. Elsewhere Barthes put it thus:"Every text is an intertext; other texts are present in it, atvarying levels, in more or less recognizable forms; earlier culturaltexts and those of the surrounding culture, every text is a new textureof passing citations . . . Intertextuality, the condition of every text,no matter what it is, is obviously not limited to a problem of sourcesor in'duences": Roland Barthes, "Texte (theoriedu)", in Encyclopaedia universalis, 20 vols. (Paris, 1968-75), xv,p. 1015c, cited from Guillen, Challenge of Comparative Literature, p.246. (4) Thus John Dunn, where he had just asserted that "[i]f astatement is considered in a fully open context, its meaning may be anylexically possible set of colligations of the uttered proposition. A manmight mean by it anything that a man might mean by it": John Dunn,"The Identity of the History of Ideas", Philosophy, xliu(1968), pp. 65-104 (at p. 98). (5) See Quentin Skinner, "The Limitsof Historical Explanations", Philosophy, xli (1966), pp. 199-215;the sentence cited appears at p. 210. (6) Note the affiliated tendencyto avoid the use of the word without resort to the protective obliquityof quotation marks -- see, e.g., Donald Winch, Adam Smith'sPolitics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge, 1978), pp.48-9, 174-5. For a good example of Skinner's influence in theserespects, see Thomas F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal:Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge,1989), pp. 9-10, where the author is careful to deny that he is"concerned to track `influences' on Starkey's mind",noting that "both Skinner and Condren have shown this concept"to be "nearly devoid of explanatory power". Ironically, Mayeris himself willing to speak of "Quentin Skinner's influentialemphasis on context": ibid, p. 9 n. 15. (7) For the especiallydifficult challenge presented in this respect by the medieval author,see Francis Oakley, The Political Thought of Pierre d'Ailly: TheVoluntarist Tradition (New Haven, 1964), pp. 198-200.

(8) Skinner, "Limits of Historical Explanations", pp.203-7, 210-11. (9) Quentin Skinner, "More's Utopia", Pastand Present, no. 38 (Dec. 1967), pp. 153-68, where the target is EdwardSurtz's discussion of the literary influences on Thomas More'sUtopia. Skinner's crushing conclusion in this case is that"[t]he only real information to come out of Surtz's study . .. concerns Surtz himself. He is clearly an extremely widely-readscholar, who while reading More has very often been reminded of otherbooks he has read. But this suggests that at best the whole business ofstudying influences is nothing more than a scholar's game; atworst, moreover, it clearly leads to the assertion of many claims whichthere is no reason to suppose are true, and which are very likelyfalse": ibid., p. 165. (10) Quentin Skinner, "Meaning andUnderstanding in the History of Ideas", History and Theory, viii(1969), pp. 3-53; reprinted conveniently in James Tully (ed.), Meaningand Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge, 1988), pp.30-67 (text), 291-309 (notes), to which my references will be given.Skinner discusses the problem of influence under the general rubric of"the mythology of parochialism" at pp. 45-7. (11) ConalCondren, The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts: An Essay onPolitical Theory, its Inheritance, and the History of Ideas (Princeton,1985), esp. pp. 129-41. (12) Ibid., pp. 136, 137-9. (13) On which, andfor the influence claims involved, see David Boucher, "NewHistories of Political Thought for Old", Political Studies, xxxi(1983), pp. 112-21 (at pp. 118-19). Boucher lists many of the pertinentpages in Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern political Thought, 2vols. (Cambridge, 1978). To that list should be added ibid., ii, pp.112, 114-18, 321, 346. Reference should also be made to Quentin Skinner,"The Origins of the Calvinist Theory of Revolution", in B. C.Malament (ed.), After the Reformation (Manchester, 1980), pp. 309-30(see esp. pp. 324-6). (14) Quentin Skinner, "A Reply to myCritics", in Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context, pp. 233, 327 n. 13.Peter Laslett himself appears to have had no reservations about theinfluence model as such. He stated that "the prime reason for theimportance attached to [Locke's Second Treatise] . . . is itsenormous historical influence": see the introduction to his editionof John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, rev. edn (New York, 1965),esp. pp. 67-79. (15) Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in theHistory of Ideas", p. 298 n. 113, referring to Philip P. Wiener,"Some Problems and Methods in the History of Ideas", Jl Hist.Ideas, xxii (1961), pp. 531-48 (at p. 537). (16) Andre Gide, "Del'influence en litterature", in OEuvres completes d'AndreGide, ed. L. Martin-Chauffier, 15 vols. (Paris, 1932-9), iii, pp.249-73. Gide's purpose was not to explore the difficulties posed bythe notion of influence but to celebrate its importance for artisticcreativity. The epoch and the writer most profoundly influenced arelikely often to be the most fertile in creativity and the mostprofoundly original. Cf. Henri Peyre, "Andre Gide et les problemesd'influence en litterature", Mod. Language Notes, lvii (1942),pp. 558-67; R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford, 1945), p.128; Louis Cazamian, "Goethe en Angleterre: quelques reflexions surles problemes d'influence", Revue germanique, xii (1921), pp.371-8 (at pp. 375-7). (17) Of the pertinent literature (which is quiteextensive), I have found the following discussions in varying degreehelpful: James Robert Hightower, "Chinese Literature in the Contextof World Literature", Comparative Literature, v (1953), pp. 117-24;H. Hassan, "The Problem of Influence in Literary History: Notestowards a Definition", Jl Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xiv (1955),pp. 66-76; Claudio Guillen, "Literature como sistema",Filologia romanza, iv (1957), pp. 1-29; Claudio Guillen, "TheAesthetics of Influence Studies in Comparative Literature" (1959),repr. in his Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory ofComparative Literature (Princeton, 1971), pp. 17-52 (see also ClaudioGuillen, "A Note on Influences and Conventions", ibid., pp.53-68; Guillen has recently returned to those issues in his Challenge ofComparative Literature, esp. pp. 24-62, 240-87); Haskell M. Block,"The Concept of Influence in Comparative Literature", Yearbookof Comparative and General Literature, vii (1958), pp. 30-57; Haskell M.Block, Nouvelles tendances en litterature comparee (Paris, 1963), pp.13-49; Rene Etiemble, Comparaison n'est pas raison: la crise de lalitterature comparee (Paris, 1963), pp. 61-73; Rene Wellek, Concepts ofCriticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr (New Haven, 1963), pp. 282-95;Goran Hermeren, Influence in Art and Literature (Princeton, 1975);Robert J. Clements, Comparative Literature as Academic Discipline: AStatement of Principles, Praxis, Standards (New York, 1978). Cf HenryPeyre, "A Glance at Comparative Literature", Yearbook ofComparative and General Literature, i (1952), pp. 1-8; Harry Levin,"La litterature comparee: point de vued'Outre-Atlantique", Revue de littirature comparee, xxvii(1953), pp. 17-26; F. W. Bateson, "Editorial Commentary",Essays in Criticism, iv (1954), pp. 436-40; R. W. Stallman, "TheScholar's Net: New Literary Sources", College English, xvu(1955), pp. 20-7. (18) A tactic, Hassan says, that did not entirelyresolve the "ambivalence that students of literature had come tofeel about the problem of influence": Hassan, "Problem ofInfluence in Literary History", p. 66. (19) Wellek, Concepts ofCriticism, ed. Nichols, pp. 282-90, Block, Nouvelles tendances enlitterature comparee, pp. 13-20. (20) See Etiemble, Comparaisonn'est pas raison, pp. 61-5, where he notes the discontent ofJapanese comparatists with what they referred to as the"positivism" and "historicism" of the French method.(21) Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. Nichols, pp. 282-3; cf. Block,Nouvelles tendances en litterature comparee, pp. 16-18. (22) Block,"Concept of Influence in Comparative Literature", pp. 30-1.(23) Thus Hassan, "Problem of Influence in Literary History",pp. 74-6. (24) This, if I understand him correctly, was the position ofClaudio Guillen in 1959: "Note on Influences and Conventions",pp. 58, 53; "Aesthetics of Influence Studies" p. 34 n. 28; cf.his earlier "Literature como sistema", esp. pp. 4, 27-9. Morerecently, certainly, Guillen has endorsed "the concept ofintertextuality . . . as especially useful for comparatists. We believethat here we have at last a way to dissipate the many ambigmties anderrors such as those brought along in the wake of the notion ofinfluences": Guillen, Challenge of Comparative Literature, p. 246.It may be remarked, however, that as scholars currently deploy it newintertextuality can sometimes appear to be nothing other than oldinfluence writ large -- and not always all that large: see, e.g., EvelynEllerman, "Intertextuality in the Fiction of Camus and Wendt",in Cornelia N. Moore and Raymond A. Moody (eds.), Comparative LiteratureEast and West: Traditions and Trends (Honolulu, 1989), pp. 43-50. (25)And in 1961 Philippe van Tieghem had poimted out that there were nofewer than twelve hundred such studies devoted to the relations betweenforeign literatures and French alone: Philippe van Tieghem, Lesinfluences etrangeres sur la litterature francaise (1550-1880) (Paris,1961), cited in Block, Nouvelles tendances en litterature comparee, p.17. (26) Block, "Concept of Influence in ComparativeLiterature", pp. 34-6. (27) Hermeren, Influence in Art andLiterature, over three hundred pages of analysis replete (in theanalytic philosophical mode) with sequences of numbered propositions --e.g., p. 93: "(R1) Ontological Requirement 2. If x influenced thecreation of y with respect to a, then x and y are visual or literaryworks of art or, alternatively, certain kinds of actions". Hermerenappears to have been unaware of Skinner's articles on the subject.(28) Ibid., p. 119. The particular kind of causal explanation he has inmind is the "counterfactual conditional", though he emphasizes(pp. 126-7) that the counterfactual conditions involved may be of morethan one kind -- all of this embedded in a highly technical set ofarguments running, in effect, from pp. 104 to 155. (29) Ibid., pp.104-6. (30) Ibid., p. 8. (31) Ibid., p. 14. (32) For these, see ibid.,ch. 2, pp. 156-262. (33) Ibid., pp. 152, 177. (34) Ibid., p. 165. (35)Ibid., p. 194. (36) Ibid., p. 246; see also ibid., pp. 247-57. (37)Ibid., pp. 320-1. (33) See David Boucher, "New Histories ofPolitical Thought for Old", Political Studies, xxxi (1983), pp.111-21 (at pp. 118-20). (39) Julian A. Franklin, review of Skinner,Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Political Theory, vii (1979),pp. 552-8 (at pp. 557-8). (40) The words which Skinner cites are thoseof Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass.,1965), pp. 1-2. (41) Following here the "brief epitome" of theargument in Skinner, "Origins of the Calvinist Theory ofRevolution", esp. pp. 312, 324-6. The argument is developed at muchgreater length in his Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ii, chs.2, 4, 9. (42) Henry Hallam, View of the State of Europe during theMiddle Ages, 3 vols. (London, 1901), iii, pp. 243, 245. The work wasoriginally published in 1818. (43) Lord Acton, Lectures on the FrenchRevolution, ed. J. W. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (London, 1910), p. 17.The lectures were delivered in Cambridge in the 1890s. J. H. Burns notesthat Acton's position in the matter had shifted somewhat across theprevious forty years and that, earlier on, he had been "unimpressedby Gerson's `attempt to apply the principles of secular polity tothe Church' ": J. H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship, and Empire:The Idea of Monarchy, 1400-1525 (Oxford, 1992), p. 10 n. 14; Lord Acton,The History of Freedom and Qther Essays, ed. J. N. Figgis and R. V.Laurence (London, 1907), pp. 191-2. (44) Otto Gierke, Political Theoriesof the Middle Age, ed. and trans. F. W. Maitland (Cambridge, 1900), pp.49-58. (45) J. N. Figgis, Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius,1414-1625: Seven Studies (New York, 1960), pp. 41-70 (at p. 41). (46)Ibid., p. 56. (47) Ibid, p. 47. (48) Ibid., pp. 46-8, 63. (49) Though hehad clearly read widely in the pertinent sources and, had he so chosen,could undoubtedly have extended the evidentiary foundations of hisclaim. (50) Figgis himself advanced his thesis on more than oneoccasion: see his "Political Thought in the SixteenthCentury", in A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothero and Stanley Leathes (eds.),The Cambridge Modern History, 13 vols. (Cambridge, 1902-11), iii, p.736; also J. N. Figgis, "Politics at the Council ofConstance", Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., new ser., xiii (1899), pp.103-15. Cf. Raymond G. Gettell, History of Political Thought (London,1924), pp. 133-5; R. H. Murray, The History of Political Science, 2ndedn (New York, 1930), p. 101; Charles H. McIlwain, The Growth ofPolitical Thought in the West (New York, 1932), p. 348 n. 2; George H.Sabine, A History of Political Theory, rev. edn (New York, 1950), pp.326-7; H. J. Laski, "Political Theory in the Later MiddleAges", in H. M. Gwatkin et al. (eds.), The Cambridge MedievalHistory, 8 vols. (Cambridge, 1911-36), viii, p. 838. (51) See the usefuldiscussions of conciliar scholarship listed in Francis Oakley,"Natural Law, the Corpus Mysticum, and Consent in Conciliar Thoughtfrom John of Paris to Matthias Ugonius", Speculum, lvi (1981), pp.786-810 (at p. 787 n. 5); of these, see esp. Guiseppe Alberigo, "Ilmovimento conciliare (xiv-xv sec.) nella ricerca storica recense",Studi Medievali, 3rd ser., xix (1978), pp. 213-50. (52) See n. 144below. (53) E. F. Jacob, Essays in the Conciliar Epoch (Manchester,1943), pp. 2-3. (54) Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory:The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the GreatSchism (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 240, 10-11; cf Gierke, Political Theoriesof the Middle Age, ed. Maitland, p. 50; Franz Bliemetzrieder, DasGeneralkonzil im grossen abendlandischen Schisma (Paderborn, 1904), pp.75-6; H. X. Arquilliere, "L'appel au concile sous Philippe leBel et la genese des theories conciliares", Revue des questionshistoriques, xlv (1911), pp. 51-5; Walter Ullmann, The Origins of theGreat Schism (London, 1948), pp. 184-5; Walter Ullmann, The Groroth ofPapal Government in the Middle Ages (London, 1955), pp. 452-3. (55) SeeHelmut G. Walther, Imperiales Konigtum, Konziliarismus undVolkssouveranitat (Munich, 1976), pp. 187-8; Hermann Josef Sieben, DieKonzilsidee des lateinischen Mittelalters (847-1378) (Paderborn, 1984),pp. 232-76 (esp. p. 255). I would judge Sieben's treatment of thecanonists as a rather wooden, literal-minded account that does not evenbegin to address the subtlety and complexity of Tierney'sformidable argument. But for a rather more positive appraisal of his(implicit) critique of Tierney, see Constantin Fasolt, Council andHierarchy: The Political Thought of William Durant the Younger(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 18-20. (56) See Francis Oakley, "Verius estlicet difficilius: Tierney's Foundations of the Conciliar Theoryafter Forty Years", in Thomas M. Izbicki and Gerald Christianson(eds.), Nicholas of Cusa on Christ and the Church (Leiden, 1996), pp.1-20. (57) I would suggest, as one striking illustration, the use thetheologian Pierre d'Ailly made of the canonistic glosses of Guidode Baysio, Hostiensis and Johannes Monachus in developing a conceptionof the church as a mixed monarchy that is very close in intention (ifnot in legal precision) to that developed on a similar basis by hisfellow conciliarist, the distinguished canonist Francesco Zabarella: seeOakley, Political Thought of Pierre d'Ailly, pp. 114-29. ForZabarella's version, see Tierney, Foundations of the ConciliarTheory, pp. 220-37. For conciliarist views of mixed monarchy in general,see now James M. Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution inthe Middle Ages (Princeton, 1992), pp. 243-59. (58) Though Otto Gierkestands out as an important exception to that generalization. And, for amore recent exception, see Juan Beneyto Perez, Historia de las doctrinalpolitical, 4th edn (Madrid, 1964), pp. 161-4. (59) Pierre Mesnard,L'essor de la philosophic politique au [XVI.sup.e] siecle (Paris,1936); J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the SixteenthCentury (London, 1928); J. W. Allen, English Political Thought 1603-1660(London, 1938); Christopher Morris, Political Thought in England:Tyndale to Hooker (London, 1953); R. W. and A. J. Carlyle, A History ofPolitical Thought in the West, 6 vols. (London, 1903-36), vi, pp. 163-7,247, where the author (A. J. Carlyle) contrasts "the ecclesiasticalquestions of the relation between the Pope and the GeneralCouncil", which he excludes from consideration, with the remarks ofthe conciliarists concerning properly "political principles".For Franklin, see n. 39 above. (60) Zofia Rueger, "Gerson, theConciliar Movement and the Right of Resistance (1642-1644)", JlHist. Ideas, xxv (1964), pp. 467-80; A. J. Black, "The ConciliarMovement", in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of MedievalPolitical Thought c.350-c.1450 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 573-87 (esp. pp.586-7); A. J. Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250-1450 (Cambridge,1992), pp. 169-78; J. H. Burns, "The Conciliarist Tradition inScotland", Scot. Hist. Rev., xlii (1963), pp. 89-104; J. H. Burns,Lordship, Kingship, and Empire, pp. 10-12; Francis Oakley, "FromConstance to 1688: The Political Thought of John Major and GeorgeBuchanan", Jl Brit. Studies, i (1962), pp. 1-31; Oakley, PoliticalThought of Pierre d'Ailly, pp. 217-32; Francis Oakley, "FromConstance to 1688 Revisited", Jl Hist. Ideas, xxvii (1966), pp.429-32; Francis Oakley, "Figgis, Constance, and the Divines ofParis", Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxv (1969),pp. 368-86; Oakley,"Natural Law, the Corpus Mysticum, and Consent in ConciliarThought". (61) As is reflected in the quite generous degree ofattention recently afforded it by the contributors to J. H. Burns andMark Goldie (eds.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought,1450-1700 (Cambridge, 1991). For Skinner, see n. 41 above. (62) Thus,for example, and less than a quarter of a century ago, Paul Ourliaccould still depict the year 1440 as the great turning-point after whichtheologians turned energetically to the "constructive task" ofvindicating the papal monarchy: Paul Ourliac and Henri Gilles, "Lesdiscordances d'une epoque", in Gabriel le Bras (ed.), Histoiredu droit et des institutions de l'Eglise en Occident, 18 vols.(Paris, 1956-84), xiii, pt 1, p. 51; cf. Paul Ourliac, "La victoirede la papaute", in A. Fliche and V. Martin (eds.), Histoire del'Eglise, 26 vols. (Paris, 1934-64), xiv, p. 285. The intrusioninto history of theological and canonistic criteria is evident in theway in which the pertinent encyclopedias have treated thefifteenth-century councils and the claim to legitimacy of the Avignoneseand Pisan popes during the Schism. For which, see the remarks in FrancisOakley, Council over Pope; Towards a Provisional Ecclesiology (New York,1969), pp. 121-6. (63) See the helpful historiographical discussion inThomas M. Izbicki, "Papalist Reaction to the Council of Constance:Juan de Torquemada to the Present", Church History, lv (1986), pp.7-20. (64) Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans.Ernest Graf, 2 vols. (London, 1957-61), i, pp. 1-165; Josef Klotzner,Kardinal Domenikus Jacobazzi und sein Konzilswerk (Rome, 1948); Olivierdela Brosse, Le pape et le concile: la comparaison de leurs pouvoirs ala veille de la Reforme (Paris, 1965); Remigius Baumer, Nachwirkungendes konziliaren Gedankens in der Theologie und Kanonistik desfrahen 16.Jahrhunderts (Munster, 1971); Remigius Baumer, "Die KonstanzerDekrete `Haec sancta' und `Frequens' im Urteil katholischerKontroverstheologen des 16. Jahrhunderts", in Remigius Baumer(ed.), Von Konstanz nach Trient: Beitrage zur Geschichte der Kirche vonden Reformkonzilien bis zum Tridentinum (Munich, 1972), pp. 547-74,Remigius Baumer, "Silvester Prierias und seine Ansichten uber dasokumenische Konzil", in Georg Schwaiger (ed.), Konzil und Papst:Historische Beitrage zur Frage des hochsten Gewalt in der Kirche(Munich, 1975), pp. 277-301; Hans-Jurgen Becker, Die Appellation vomPapst an ein allgeimeines Konzil: Historisches Entwicklung undkanonistische Diskussion im spaten Mittelalter und derfruhen Nenzeit(Vienna, 1988), pp. 339-84. See also J. H. Burns, "The ConciliaristTradition in Scotland", Scot. Hist. Rev., xlii (1963), pp. 89-104;K. A. Fink, "Die konziliare Idee im spaten Mittelalter", inTh. Mayer (ed.), Lie Welt zur des Konstanzer Konzils (Constance, 1965),pp. 119-34; Josef Macek, "Le mouvement conciLiaire, Louis XI etGeorges de Podebrady", Historica, xv (1967), pp. 5-63; Josef Macek,"Der Konziliarismus in der bohmischen Reformation, besonders in derPolitik Georgs von Podiebrad", Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte,lxxx (1969), pp. 312-30; Paul W. Knoli, "The University of Cracowand the ConciLiar Movement", in James M. Kittelson and Pamela J.Transue (eds.), Rebirth, Reform and Resilience: Universities inTransition, 1300-1700 (Columbus, 1986), pp. 190-202; introduction,"The Twilight of the ConciLiar Era", in Gabriel Biel,Defensorium obedientiae apostoRcae et alia documenta, ed. Heiko A.Oberman, Daniel E. Zerfoss and WiLliam J. Courtenay (Cambridge, Mass.,1968), pp. 3-55; Francis Oakley, "Almain and Major: ConciliarTheory on the Eve of the Reformation", Amer. Hist. Rev., lxx(1965), pp. 673-90; Francis Oakley, "Conciliarism at the FifthLateran Council?", Church History, xli (1972), pp. 452-63; FrancisOakley, "ConciLiarism in the Sixteenth Century: Jacques AlmainAgain", Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte, lxviii (1977), pp.111-32; Oakley, "Natural Law, the Corpus Mysticum. and Consent inConciliar Thought"; Thomas F. Mayer, "Marco Mantova, a BronzeAge Conciliarist", Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, xvi (1984), pp.385-408; James V. Mehl, "The First Printed Editions of the Historyof Church Councils", ibid, xviii (1986), pp. 128-43; James V. Mehl,"Ortwin Gratius, Conciliarism, and the Call for ChurchReform", Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte, lxxvi (1985), pp.169-94. (65) Hans Schneider, Der Konziliarismus als Problem der neuerenkatholischen Theologie (Berlin, 1976), esp. chs. 2, 3, 4, pp. 27-119;Hermann Josef Sieben, Die katholische Konzilsidee von der Reformationbis zur Auf klarung (Paderborn, 1988). (66) For a recent reiteration ofthis older view, see Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250-1550: AnIntellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and ReformationEurope (New Haven, 1980), pp. 176, 398-9. (67) See Oakley,"Conciliarism at the Fifth Lateran Council?", pp. 462-3, whereI conclude that Bishop Bossuet's "Gallican"interpretation of this particular piece of history is more plausiblethan that of his ultramontane critics. (68) Thus in November 1518, inanticipation of a papal condemnation, Luther appealed from the judgementof the pope to that of a future general council, drawing some sectionsof his text from the earlier appeal launched by the theologians of theSorbonne in response to the compromising Franco-papal concordat of 1516:see Jules Thomas, Le concordat de 1516, 3 vols. (Paris, 1919), iii, pp.72-4. Heinrich Bullinger, Of the Holy Catholic Church, Zwingli andBullinger, ed. and trans. G. W. Bromiley (Philadelphia, 1953), pp.283-325 (at p. 317). (69) For which, see Mehl, "First PrintedEditions of the History of Church Councils", passim. (70) Buchananadmitted his earlier adherence to the conciliarist position when he wasin the hands of the Lisbon Inquisition in 1550: see James M. Aitken, TheTrial of George Buchanan before the Lisbon Inquisition (Edinburgh,1939), pp. 22-5. Cf Burns, "Conciliarist Tradition inScotland", pp. 101-4. (71) One of the more unexpected conciliaristsurvivals in Italy is the presence of more than one conciliaristin thecourt of Julius II himself: see Hubert Jedin, "Giovanni Gozzadini,ein Konziliarist am Hofe Julius II", in Hubert Jedin, Kirche desGlaubens, Kirche der Geschichte: Ausgewahlte Auisatze und Vortrage, 2vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1966), ii, pp. 17-74; Nelson H. Minnich,"Girolamo Massaino: Another Conciliarist at the Papal Court, JuliusII to Adrian VI", in Nelson H. Minnich et al., Studies in CatholicHistory in Honor of John Tracy Ellis (Wilmington, 1985), pp. 520-65. Forother Italian exponents of conciliarist ideas in the mid-sixteenthcentury, see Mayer, "Marco Mantova, a Bronze AgeConciliarist", pp. 385-408; Thomas F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and theCommonweal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII(Cambridge, 1989), pp. 172-87. (72) Sieben, Katholische Konzilsidee vonder Reformation bis zur Aufklarung. (73) That ideological warfare beganin 1606 with the imposition of an Oath of Allegiance in England and of apapal interdict in Venice. The most complete discussion of the Englishand French aspects of the controversy is still that of Charles H.McIlwain in the lengthy introductory essay he wrote for his edition ofThe Political Works of James I (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), pp. xxxv-lxxx.J. H. M. Salmon also touches upon those aspects very helpfully in"Gallicanism and Anglicanism in the Age of the CounterReformation", chi. 2 of his Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in theIntellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge,1987), pp. 155-88; Salmon also offers a brief discussion of theintricate linkages between France and Venice and Venice and England andsets them in a broader context in "Catholic Resistance Theory,Ultramontanism, and the Royalist Response, 1580-1620", in Burns andGoldie (eds.), Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700, pp.219-53. I know of no full account of the complete controversy in itsVenetian, French and English dimensions as it played out in the yearsbetween 1606 and 1620. I draw in what follows on Francis Oakley,"Constance, Basel, and the Two Pisas: The Conciliarist Legacy inSixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England", Annuarium HistoriaeConciliorum, xxvi (1994), pp. 1-32. (74) See Joannis Gersonii . . .opera, ed. Edmond Richer, 2 vols. (Paris, 1606), ii, cols. 675-934.

(75) Fra Paolo Sarpi, Trattato dell'interdetto della san tita dipapa Paolo V, in his Opere, 9 vols. (Bari, 1931-b5), vi, Istoriadell'interdetto e altri scritti editi e inediti, ed. M. D. Rusnelliand Giovanni Gambarin, 3 pts, iii, pp. 1-41; see esp. pp. 1-41, 15-18,21-3, 27, 30-3. This reliance on conciliarist authors and theconcomitant willingness to invoke the authority of Constance and Baselwere characteristic of most of Sarpi's writings on the interdict:see, e.g., Scrittura sopra la forza e validita della scommunica giustaed ingiusta, e sopra li remedii "de iure" e "defacto" da usare contro le censure ingiusta, ibid., ii, pp. 28,32-3; Scrittura intorno l'appellazione al concilio o altro da farsiper mortificare gli atti del pontifice, ibid., pp. 82-5; Trattato eresoluzioni sopra la validita delle scommuniche di Giovanni Gersone,teologo e cancelliero parisino, cognominato il dottore cristianissimo,ibid., pp. 171-84; Apologia per le opposizioni fattedall'illustrissimo e reverendissimo signor cardinale Bellarminioalli trattati e resoluzioni di Giovanni Gersone sopra la validita dellescommuniche, ibid., iii, pp. 43-189; [Lettere agli inquisitori in Roma],ibid, pp. 190, 194; Scrittura in difesa delle opere scritte a favoredella serenissima republica nella controversia col sommo pontefice,ibid, pp. 236, 255. (76) John Mair, Disputatio de auctoritate conciliisupra pontificem maximum, in Jean Gerson, Opera omnia, ed. Louis ElliesDupin, 5 vols. (Antwerp, 1706), ii, p. 1132, cf. p. 1144; JacquesAImain, Expositio circa decisiones Magistri Guillielmi Occam depotestate ecclesiastica et laica, ibid, p. 1070. (77) Sarpi, Apologiaper le opposizioni fatte dall'illustrissimo e reverendissimo signorcardinale Bellarminio, ed. Busnelli and Gambarin, iii, p. 118. Sarpidevotes no less than a fifth of this work (pp. 79-80, 115-54) to arebuttal of Bellarmine's assertion of the superiority of pope tocouncil. (78) Under the title An Apology or Apologeticall Answere, Madeby Father Paule a Venetian . . . unto the Exceptions and Objections ofCardinall Bellarmine against Certain Treatises and Resolutions of JohnGerson (London, 1607, S.T.C. 21757); see pp. 64-5. (79) I base thisclaim on Oakley, "Constance, Basel, and the Two Pisas", towhich reference may be made for the complete argument and the full rangeof supporting documentation. (80) A learned churchman who disposed of animpressive degree of scholastic and canonistic erudition, Sutcliffeshowed a marked degree of familiarity with the writings of suchprominent conciliarists as Pierre d'Ailly, Jean Gerson, FrancescoZabarella, Nicholas of Cusa, Panormitanus, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolominiand Jacques Almain: see Oakley, "Constance, Basel, and the TwoPisas", pp. 15-17. (81) For a succinct account of Henry'sconciliar diplomacy, see now Becker, Appellation vom Papst an einallgemeines Konzil, pp. 264-9. The basic studies are P. A. Sawada,"The Abortive Council of Mantua and Henry VIII", Academia[Nanzan Univ., Nagoya], xxvii (1960), pp. 1-15; P. A. Sawada, "TwoAnonymous Tudor Treatises on the General Council", Jl Eccles.Hist., xii (1961), pp. 197-214; P. A. Sawada, "Das ImperiumHeinrichs VIII, und die erste Phase seiner Konzilspolitik", inIrwin Iserloh (ed.), Reformata Reformanda: Festgabe fur Hubert Jedin, 2vols. (Munster, 1965), i, pp. 476-507. Cf. Franklin Le Van Baumer, TheEarly Tudor Theory of Kingship (New Haven, 1940), pp. 49-56; J. J.Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Berkeley, 1963), pp. 261-4, 293, 319, 390-1.For the second development, see John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of theseLatter and Perilous Dayes, Touching Matters of the Church, ed. StephenReed Cattley, 8 vols. (London, 1841), iii, pp. 416-23 (for Constance),605-700 (for Basel). This edition reproduces the contents of the firstEnglish edition of 1563 (S.T.C. 11222). See also Thomas Bilson, The TrueDifference between Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion(Oxford, 1585, S.T.C. 3071), esp. pp. 85-94, 270-3, 310-11. (82) SeeJames I, A Premonition to all Most Mightie Monarches, Kings, FreePrinces, and States of Christendome, in Political Works of James I, ed.McIlwain, pp. 119-20; James I, A Remonstrance for the Right of Kings,and the Independence of their Crownes, against an Oration of the MostIllustrious Cardinal of Perron, ibid., pp. 181, 198, 202-6, 263-4. (83)Jacques Davy, Cardinal du Perron, An Oration Made on the Part of theLordes Spirituale in the Chamber of the Third Estate, Translated intoEnglish (St Omer, 1616, S.T.C. 6384), pp. 47-9, 59, 63. James couldbluster that Perron had misrepresented the views of these men. But oneof his own quotations from the works of Mair inadvertently revealed thatMair himself was far from denying the right of the people to deposetheir king: see his Remonstrance for the Right of Rings, ed. McIlwain,p. 202. For Mair's own words, see his Disputatio de statu etpotestate ecclesiae, in Gerson, Opera omnia, ed. Dupin, ii, pp. 1128-9.And this point appears not to have been missed later on by theparliamentarian William Prynne, who, defending the right of subjects toresist tyranny, and citing the same work of Mair's, commented that:"lest any should think that none but Puritanes have maintained thisopinion, K. Iames himself in his Answer to Card. Perron, justifieth theFrench Protestant taking up Defensive Arms in France": WilliamPrynne, The Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdoms (London, 1643),pp. 144-5. (84) Some authors explicitly specify Richer's edition astheir source: see, e.g., George Blackwell, A Large Examination Taken atLambeth: of M. George Blackwell Made Archpriest of England by PopeClement 8 (London, 1607, S.T.C. 3104), pp. 63, 118; William Warmington,A Moderate Defence of the Oath of Allegiance ([n.p.], 1612, S.T.C.25076), p. 88. And the frequent citation by others of the particularexcerpt from Mair's Sentences which Richer had reprinted (IV Sent.,dist. 24, questio 3) gives a further clue to the impact of this edition.For James's gift to St Andrews, see Rueger, "Gerson, theConciliar Movement, and the Right of Resistance", p. 484. (85)Thus, for example, John Buckeridge had clearly read d'Ailly'sDe reformatione ecclesiae in the edition which Ortwin Gratius hadincluded in his Fasisculus rerum expetendarum (Cologne, 1535), eventhough, eight years before he wrote, it had been republished in Londonin Nicolaus de Clemangiis, Speculum ecclesiae . . . de corruptoecclesiae statu (London, 1606, S. T. C. 5397), pp. 145-92: JohnBuckeridge, De potestate papae in rebus temporalibus .. . adversusRobertum cardinalem Bellarminum (London, 1614, S.T.C. 4002), p. 132. Forthe reading of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini's account of theproceedings at the Council of Basel via the translation included inFoxe's Book of Martyrs, see nn. 107, 108 below. (86) Skinner,"More's Utopia", p. 164. (87) Though that alignment didnot prevent Juan de Mariana, on the very eve of the Oath of Allegiancecontroversy, from evoking the analogy of conciliar superiority in thecontext of discussing whether or not the commonwealth possessed greaterpower than did the king. He was careful, however, to insist that hehimself was passing no judgement on the rectitude of the canonisticclaim: Juan de Mariana, De rege et regis inslitutione (Mainz, 1605),lib. i, c. 8, pp. 72-4. William Prynne, later on, was quick to pick upon this passage: Prynne, Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdoms,p. 68. By contrast, in the works of William Rainolds (Rossaeus), Dejusta reipublicae Christianae in reges impios et haereticos authoritate(Paris, 1590), and Jean Boucher, De justa Henrici Tertii abdicatione eFrancorum regno (Lyons, 1591), students of conciliar theory are likelyto encounter much that may strike them as familiar. But nothing, nonethe less, on which to build a case for anything more than the existenceof interesting parallelisms. (89) John Maxwell, Sacro-sancta regummajestas: or, The Sacred and Royall Prerogative of Christian Kings(Oxford, 1644), p. 6; cf. ibid., p. 3. (90) Ibid., pp. 14-16. (91)Ibid., p. 12. (92) See Thomas H. Clancy, Papist Pamphleteers: TheAllen-Persons Party and the Political Thought of the Counter-Reformationin England, 1572-1615 (Chicago, 1964), p.88. (93) James I, Premonitionto all most Mightie Monarches, Kings, Free Princes, and States ofChristendome, ed. McIlwain, p. 126. (94) Thomas Morton, An ExactDiscoverie of Romish Doctrine in the Case of Conspiracie and Rebellion(London, 1605, S. T. C. 18184), p. 1; cf. his A Full Satisfactionconcerning a Double Romish Iniquitie; Hainous Rebellion, and More thanHeathenish AEquivocation (London, 1606, S.T.C. 18185), p. 107, where hecharacterizes as "a learning substantially popish" the"seditious doctrine of resisting and deposing Kings". (95)David Owen, Herod and Pilate Reconciled (London, 1610, S.T. C. 18983),pp. 43-6, 48, 50-1. He returned to similar themes during the Civil Warin his A Persuasion to Loyalty, or the Subjecte Dutie: Wherein is Provedthat Resisting or Deposing of Kings is Utterly Unlawfull (London, 1642),p. 24. The French version of Beza's De jure magistratuum (Du Droitdes magistrate sur leurs sudets) is to be found in Memoires del'Estat de France sous Charles IX, ed. Simon Goulart, 3 vols.(Meidelbourg, 1576), ii, pp. 735-90, esp. p. 777; for the question ofauthorship, see Albert Elkan, Die Publizistik der Bartholomausnachts undMornay's "Vindiciae contra tyrannos" (Heidelberg, 1905),pp. 60-123. Lambert Daneau was certainly well aware of the conciliaristclaims advanced by the Council of Constance and its vindication of thoseclaims via the judgement and deposition of popes: see his Ad RobertiBellarmini disputationes theological (Geneva, 1596), pp. 330-1, 343,673. But I have been unable to find the passage to which Prynne refersin Daneau's Politices Christianae libri septem (Geneva, 1596) or inthe other writings of his to which I have had access. (96) A facsimileedition of Ponet's A Shorte Treatise of Politicke Power is printedin Winthrop S. Hudson, John Ponet (1516?-1556), Advocate of LimitedMonarchy (Chicago, 1942): see pp. [102]-[6]; cf. p. [60]. GeorgeBuchanan, De jure regni apud Scotos, in his Opera omnia, ed. ThomasRuddiman, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1715), i, pp. 8, 30, 36. As he himselfadmitted in 1550, when he was in the hands of the Lisbon Inquisition, hehad been in his earlier Catholic days an adherent to the conciliarposition: Aitken, Trial of George Buchanan before the LisbonInquisition, pp. 22-S. Junius Brutus [i.e., Philippe DuPlessis Mornay],Vindiciae contra tyrannos (Baser, 1580), pp. 173-4; Anon., Discourspolitiques des diverges paissances establies de Dieu au monde, inMemoires de l'Estat de France sous Charles IX, ed. Goulart, 2ndedn, 3 vols. (Meidelbourg, 1579), iii, fos. [147.sup.b]-[213.sup.a] (atfos. [209.sup.b]-[210.sup.a]). (97) I cite this passage from aseventeenth-century English translation: Vindiciae contra tyrannos . . .Being a Treatise Written in Latin and French by Junius Brutus andTranslated out of both into English (London, 1689), p. 142. For a moreextensive discussion of this sixteenth-century phase in the influence ofconciliarist views on Calvinist resistance theory, see Oakley,"From Constance to 1688". In that article I now believe that Ioverstated somewhat Buchanan's indebtedness to Mair, perhaps alsothe importance of the pupil-teacher relationship. As J. H. Burns madeclear a year later (1963), conciliar ideas were prevalent in Scotlandeven prior to Mair's return from Paris: Burns, "ConciliaristTradition in Scotland". For a carefully nuanced analysis ofMair's political views, see J. H. Burns, "Politia regalis etoptima: The Political Ideas of John Mair", Hist. Polit. Thought, ii(1981), pp. 31-61. (98) Buckeridge, De potestate papae in rebustemporalibus, pp. 675-6 (citing William Barclay); cf. ibid., pp. 677-86.(99) John Bramhall, Serpent-Salve (1643), in The Works of the MostReverend Father in God, John Bramhall, D.D., ed. A. W. H., 5 vols.(Oxford, 1842-5), iii, p. 316. For citations by Bramhall ofGerson's De auferabilitate . . . papae, De unitate ecclesiasticaand Regulae morales, see A Just Vindication of the Church of England,ibid., i, pp. 251, 254; Schism Guarded, and Beaten Back upon the RightOwners, ibid., ii, p. 610. (100) Henry Ferne, The Resolving ofConscience upon this Question: Whether upon such a Supposition or Case,as is Now Usually Made . . . Subjects may Take up Arms and Resist?, 2ndedn (Oxford, 1643), sig. A3; Henry Ferne, Conscience Satisfied: ThatThere is no Warrant for the Arms now Taken up by Subjects (Oxford,1643), pp. 38-9, where he is replying to Charles Herle, A Fuller Answerto a Treatise Written by Doctor Ferne Entitled The Resolving ofConscience . . . (London, 1642), p. 18. (101) See Conrad Russell,Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629 (Oxford, 1979), p. 354. Forthe passage in question, see Commons Debates 1628, ed. Robert C. Johnsonet al., 6 vols. (New Haven, 1977-83), iii, p. 102 (26 Apr. 1628). Theeditors conclude that "the discourse of the Council of Basel"which Digges refers to here was Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini's Degestis concilii Basiliensis commentariorum, libri II, and they refer us(not inappropriately) to the latter's rendition of a speechdelivered in 1431 by the bishop of Burgos. I would append thespeculation that Digges may have been familiar with the De gestis viathe lengthy translated extract John Foxe had seen fit to fold into hisBook of Martyrs. (102) See n. 81 above. (103) See A Defence of libertyagainst Tyrants: A Translation of the Vindiciae contra tyrannos byJunius Brutus, ed. H. J. Laski (London, 1924), introduction, pp. 59-60;Hudson, John Ponet (1516?-1556), Advocate of Limited Monarchy, pp.209-10. (104) See Oakley, "From Constance to 1688", p. 11 andn. 50. (105) Prynne, Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdoms,pp.5-7, 9, 20, 23, 31, 68, 73, 122, 136, 144-5; ibid., app., pp. 100-12,161. (106) Ibid., p. 6. (107) Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ed. Cattley,iii, pp. 611-12. The Cattley edition reproduces the first Englishedition (1563). In some later editions the number of pages devoted toBasel was reduced, but this speech was still included. For the original,see Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, De gestis concilii Basiliensiscommentariorum libri II, ed. and trans. Denys Hay and W. K. Smith(Oxford, 1967) pp. 32-3. (108) William Bridge, The Wounded ConscienceCured, the Weak One Strengthened and the Doubting Satisfied by Way ofAnswer to Doctor Ferne (London, 1642), pp. 2, 7-8; also William Bridge,The Truths of the Times Vindicated (London, 1643), pp. 2-7, 45 SamuelRutherford, Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince (London, 1644), pp. 50 418,449. (109) Skinner, "Origins of the Calvinist Theory ofRevolution", p. 325. (110) Rueger, "Gerson, the ConciliarMovement, and the Right of Resistance", p. 486. (111) Laski,"Political Theory in the Later Middle Ages", p. 838. (112)Thus, for example, Julian Franklin argues that "the specificinfluence" of the conciliarists on the ideas of Beza and DuPlessisMornay was "only marginal": Franklin, review of Skinner,Foundations of Modern Political Thought, p. 558. (113) See nn. 11, 12above. (114) These are the questions Collingwood insists must be askedif we are to avoid the practice of "a frivolous and superficialtype of history": Collingwood, Idea of Nature, p. 128. ClaudioGuillen appears to have had something similar in mind when he properlyinsisted that "to ascertain an influence is to make a valuejudgment, not to measure a fact. The critic is obliged to evaluate thefunction or the scope of the effect of A on the making of B, for he isnot listing the total amount of these effects, which are legion, butordering them. Thus `influence' and `significant influence'are practically synonymous": Guillen, "Aesthetics of InfluenceStudies",pp. 38-9. I would also suggest that it might be profitableto read Gide's "apology for influence" (see n. 16 above)in the context of the questions Collingwood poses. (115) Walter Ullmann,Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn(London, 1966), pp. 288-315; Walter Ullmann, A History of Politicalthought in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1965), pp. 219-25, 313-14.For an earlier and fuller analysis of these and J. B. Morrall'saffiliated claims, though not of those advanced later by J. P. Canningand Cary J. Nederrnan, see Oakley, "Figgis, Constance, and theDivines of Paris", pp. 376-86; for the background to Ullmann'streatment of conciliar thinking in particular and medievalconstitutionalism in general, see Francis Oakley, "CelestialHierarchies Revisited: Walter Ullmann's Vision of MedievalPolitics", Past and Present, no. 60 (Aug. 1973), pp. 3-48. (116) JB. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times (New York, 1962), pp.126-7. (117) UIImann, Principles of Government, p. 314; cf. Ullmann,History of Political Thought, pp. 223-5. (118) Morrall, PoliticalThought in Medieval Times, p. 128. (119) Quoting here Ullmann'sreview of Oakley, Political Thought of Pierre d'Ailly, RenaissanceNews, xviu (1965), pp.305-7. (120) An allegation made with specificreference to the use made of Gerson's ideas but as part of asweeping dismissal of the pertinence to the shaping of early modernconstitutionalism of conciliar theory in particular and medievalecclesiology in general: see Cary J. Nederman, "Conciliarism andConstitutionalism: Jean Gerson and Medieval Political Thought",Hist. European Ideas, xii (1990), pp. 189-209 (at pp. 189-92). For arebutal, see Francis Oakley, "Nederman, Gerson, Conciliar Theoryand Constitutionalism: see contra", Hist. Polit. Thought, xvi(1995), pp. 1-19. (121) A point emphasized much of late by GuiseppeAlberigo, Chiesa conciliare: identita e significato del conaliarismo(Brescia, 1981), esp. p. 17, and Fasolt, Council and Hierarchy, esp. pp.318-19. (122) He defines a general council as follows: "A council .. . is a congregation [of representatives] drawn from every hierarchicalrank whose concern it is, summoned by those to whom that duty pertains,to deal according to the common intention with matters concerning thegeneral welfare of Christendom" ("Concilium . . . estcongregatio ex omni statu hierarchico, quorum interest, convocata ab iisquibus incumbit, ad tractandum communi intentione, de utilitate publicaChristiana"): Mair, Disputatio de auctoritate concilii suprapontificem maximum, in Gerson, Opera omnia, ed. Dupin, ii, p. 1132.(123) Just as in some periods,he says, prelates have been elected by thewhole people and clergy and in others by the clergy alone, similarly thecouncil, if it so desires, is at liberty to extend or restrict the votein accordance with the needs of the times: Jean Gerson, De potestateecclesiastica, ibid., p. 250; of jean Gerson, Sermo: "Ambulate dumlucem habetis", ibid, p. 205. (124) Jacques Almain, Tractatus deauctoritate ecclesiae, ibid., pp. 1011-12, Almain, Expositio cirwadecisiones Magistri Guillielmi Occam de potestate ecclesiastica etlaica, ibid., p. 1067; Jean Gerson, Quaestio resumptiva . . . de dominionaturali, civili et ecclesiastico, ibid, p. 973. (125) Pierred'Ailly, Oratio de officio imperatoris, ibid., p. 921; Pierred'Ailly, Disputatio de jure suffragii quibus competat, in Rerumconcilii oecumenici Constantiensis, eds. Herman von der Hardt, 6 vols.(Leipzig, 1697), ii, pp. 224-7; cf. Pierre d'Ailly, Tractatus deecclesiastica potestate, in Gerson, Opera omnia, ed. Dupin, ii, p. 941.See Pierre d'Ailly, Tractatus de materia concilii generalis, inOakley, Political Thought of Pierre d'Ailly, app. iii, pp. 244-345(at pp. 268, 272-3); cf. ibid, pp. 152-4. (126) See Morrall, PoliticalThought in Medieval Times, pp. 128-9, where he comments that for Gerson"the presence of the laity is not necessary for they arerepresented in the Council by the clergy; the argument is reminiscent ofthe theory of `virtual' representation in the pre-1832 BritishHouse of Commons as put forward by those who opposed the reform of thatinstitution". For a succinct analysis of the complex notion ofrepresentation involved in conciliar thinking, see Brian Tierney,"The Idea of Representation in the Medieval Councils of theWest", Concilium, xix (1983), pp. 25-30. (127) Pierre D'Ailly,Additio circa tertiam viam supratactam, in Martin de Alpartils ChronicaActitatorum, ed. Franz Ehrle (Paderborn, 1906), p. 506. (128)D'Ailly, Disputatio de jure suffragii quibus competat, ed. von derHardt, ii, pp. 225-7. (129) For a fuller discussion, along withreferences to the pertinent works of these authors, see Oakley,"Constance, Basel, and the Two Pisas", pp. 30-1. (130) SamuelRutherford, The Due Right of Presbyteries: or, A Peaceable Plea for theGovernment of the Church of Scotland (London, 1644), pp. 332-3, 336-7,340-3. (131) For which, see the analysis in Oakley, Council over Pope?,pp. 61-7. (132) Cf. Rueger, "Gerson, the Conciliar Movement, andthe Right of Resistance", p. 483: "[T]he conciliar assertionof supremacy and the conciliar deposition of the Pope appeared to offera unique example of a seemingly successful application of this universalmedieval principle [i.e., the right of resistance to a ruler turnedtyrant] to the only form of medieval monarchy which was foundedexclusively on divine right and excluded the idea of consent -- thePapacy. At least this is what to Buchanan seemed to be the chief lessonof the Conciliar Movement". (133) Skinner, "Origins of theCalvinist Theory of Revolution", p. 325. (134) Johan Sommerville,Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London, 1986), p. 46. (135)Maxwell, Sacro-sancta regum majestas, p. 3. (136) Rutherford, Lex, Rex,p. 418. (337) Bridge, Truths of the Times Vindicated, p. 49. (138)Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, p. 3. (139) Ibid., p. 12.(140) W, garret, Jus regis, seu De absoluto et independent) seculariumprincipum dominio et obsequio eis debito (Baser, 1612), p. 28;Buckeridge, De potestate papae, p. 291; Robert Bolton, Two SermonsPreached at Northampton at Two Severall Assises There (London, 1639,S.T.C. 3256), sermon 1, p. 16. For a Catholic endorsem*nt of that view,see R. Sheldon, Certain General Reasons, Proving the Lawfulnesse of theOath of Allegiance (London, 1611, S.T.C. 22393), pp. 11-12. (141) SeeJulian H. Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty: MixedMonarchy and the Right of Resistance in the Political Thought of theEnglish Revolution (Cambridge, 1978), ch. 2, pp. 22-49. Such, indeed,was the hesitancy and confusion in the thinking of the parliamentaryleaders on this score that, when the Civil War finally broke out,"they claimed to be fighting for the corporate whole ofking-and-parliament against the erring person of Charles": thusBrian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought,1150-1650 (142) Or again, "[t] the poverty of theory about secularparliaments contrasts with the wealth of ideas about the representativeor constitutional role of councils in the late medieval church":Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250-1450, pp. 166, 169, 178. Hiswhole chapter on parliamentary representation (pp. 162-85) is excellent,(143) See, for example, Bridge, Wounded Conscience Cured, p. 46. (144)For some representative passages from the Parisian conciliarists, seeJean Gerson, Tractatus de unitate ecclesiae, in Gerson, Opera omnia, ed.Dupin, u, pp. 114-15; Jean Gerson, Sermo: "Prosperum iterfacie"", ibid, p. 279; Jean Gerson, De auferabilitate . . .papae, ibid, p. 216; Gerson, De potestate ecclesiastica, ed. Dupin, pp.240, 253-5; Almain, Quaestio resumptiva . . . de dominio naturali,civili et ecclesiastico, ed. Dupin, p. 970; Almain, Expositio circadecisiones Magistri Guillielmi Occam de potestate ecclesiastica etlaica, ed. Dupin, pp. 1024, 1075-6, 1107; Almain, Tractatus deauctoritate ecclesiae, ed. Dupin, pp. 991, 1009. For John Mair, seeOakley, "From Constance to 1688", pp. 13-19; for Pierred'Ailly, see Oakley, Political Thought of Pierre d'Ailly, esp.pp. 52-4; for the conciliarists of Basel, see Antony Black, Monarchy andCommunity: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy, 1430-i450(Cambridge, 197D), pt i, pp. 7-52. (145) Sir Thomas More, TheConfutation of Tyndale's Answer, in The Complete Works of St.Thomas More, ed. Louis A. Schuster et al., 20 vols. (New Haven,1963-87), viii, pt 1, p. 146, 11.15-21; cf Brian Gogan, The Common Corpsof Christendom: Ecclesiological Themes in the Writings of Sir ThomasMore (Leiden, 1982), pp. 290-9. Sarpi, Apologia per le opposizioni fattedall'illustrissimo e reverendissimo signor cardinale Bellarminio,ed. Busnelli and Gambarin, pp. 128-9; I cite the English version,Apology or Apologeticall Answer, pp. 74-5. (146) Oakley, "Figgis,Constance, and the Divines of Paris", pp. 368-86. (147) Pierred'Ailly, Utrum Petri ecclesia lege reguletur, in Gerson, Operaomnia, ed. Dupin, i, pp. 667-8. (148) Burns, Lordship, Kingship andEmpire, p. 9; cf. Black, Monarchy and Community, esp. pt 3, pp. 85-129;J. H. Black, Council and Commune: The Conciliar Movement and theFifteenth-Century Heritage (London, 1979). (149) I draw here and in whatfollows on the line of argument developed in Oakley, "Natural Law,the Corpus Mysticum, and Consent", to which reference may be madefor the pertinent printed texts and for some extracts from the unprintedmanuscripts. (150) Black, Monarchy and Community, p. 14. (151) Thus A.J. Black, speaking with specific reference to the formulation ofHeimerich van de Velde (= de Campo, d. 1460), in his "The RealistEcclesiology of Heimerich van de Velde", in Edmond J. M. van Eij1(ed.), Facultas S. Theologiae Lovanensis, 1432-1797: bijdragen tot haargeschiedenis (Leuven, 1977), pp. 273-91. (152) See esp. John ofSegovia's speech at Mainz in 1441, in Deutsche Reichstagsakten,older ser., ed. H. Weigel et al., 17 vols. (Gotha and Stuttgart,1898-1939), xv, pp. 648-759 (at pp. 682-3). For a discussion of this andof related texts, see Black, Monarchy and Community, pp. 14-15, 45-7,109-12. (153) See Oakley, "From Constance to 1688", pp. 11-31;Hudson, John Ponet (1516?-1556), Advocate of Limited Monarchy, pp.171-2. (154) Figgis, Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, pp. 60-1.(155) Ponet, Shorte Treatise of Politicke Power, pp. [104]-[5]. (156)Thus Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris, 1966), available inEnglish as The Order of Things (New York, 1970), p. 275; MichelFoucault, L'archeologie du savoir (Paris, 1969), translated by A.M. Sheridan as The Archeology of Knowledge (New York, 1972), pp. 138-9.(157) Thus Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present (Boston, 1981), pp.85-6. (158) Thus Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the Historyof Ideas", pp. 54-5, having previously said: "My concern here. . . is not empirical but conceptual: not to insist that such[Lovejovian] histories can sometimes go wrong, but that they can nevergo right". Viewing this assessment as based on a misreading ofArthur O. Lovejoy's distinctive historical project, I have entereda sharp dissent to Skinner's claims: Francis Oakley, Omnipotence,Covenant, and Order: An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelardto Leibniz (Ithaca, 1984), pp. 27-40.

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