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The First French Reformation: Church Reform and the Origins of the Old Regime
Abstract
The political culture of absolute monarchy that structured French society into the eighteenth century is generally believed to have emerged late in the sixteenth century. This new interpretation of the origins of French absolutism, however, connects the fifteenth-century conciliar reform movement in the Catholic Church to the practice of absolutism by demonstrating that the monarchy appropriated political models derived from canon law. Tyler Lange reveals how the reform of the Church offered a crucial motive and pretext for a definitive shift in the practice and conception of monarchy, and explains how this First French Reformation enabled Francis I and subsequent monarchs to use the Gallican Church as a useful deposit of funds and judicial power. In so doing, the book identifies the theoretical origins of later absolutism and the structural reasons for the failure of French Protestantism.
... Il n'en demeure pas moins que l'opposition entre cordeliers et fabristes structura de puissantes rivalités qui dépassaient le cadre de Meaux. D'un côté, les prédicateurs du cénacle et Lefèvre soutenus par Briçonnet et bénéficiant de la protection royale (François I er et Marguerite de Navarre) ; de l'autre, les cordeliers associés à la Faculté de théologie de Noël Béda et soutenus par le Parlement de Paris qui souhaitaient réduire à néant l'expérience de Meaux considérée comme une contagion de l'hérésie luthérienne106 . La captivité de François I er à Madrid priva Briçonnet d'un puissant soutien. ...
Through its close, critical reading of the political treatises and polemical literature produced in France in the sixteenth century, this book offers a valuable new contribution to the intellectual history of the Early Modern era. Sophie Nicholls analyses the political thought of the theologians and jurists in the Holy League as they pursued their crusade against heresy in the French kingdom, during the wars of religion (1562-1629). Contemporaries portrayed the Leaguers as rebellious anarchists, who harboured dangerously democratic ideas. In contrast, Nicholls demonstrates that the intellectuals in the movement were devoted royalists, who had more in common with their moderate counterparts, the 'politiques'. In paying close attention to the conceptual language of politics in this era, this book shows how jurists and theologians in the League presented visions of sovereignty that subtly replenished medieval ideas of kingship and priesthood, and endeavoured to replace them with a new synthesis of intellectual tradition and political power. In a period when 'the state' was still emerging as an idea, analysing League thought in the context of Jesuit and Second Scholastic sources positions the Leaguers in relation to innovative attempts in European Catholic circles to re-think the nature of belonging to a political community.
How does authority become power? How does power justify itself to achieve its ends? For over two hundred years, the Valois kings relied on a complex mixture of ideologies, ruling a monarchical commonwealth with a coherent theory of shared governance. Forged in the Hundred Years War, this commonwealth built on the defense of the public good (bien public) came undone both practically and theoretically during the Wars of Religion. Just as certain kings sought to expand the royal prerogative, so, too, elites fought to preserve their control over local government. Using town archives from more than twenty cities to complement traditional sources of political theory, The French Monarchical Commonwealth, 1356–1560 establishes the relationship between seemingly theoretical constructs, like the Salic Law, and the reality of everyday politics.
The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France - by Mack P. Holt September 2018
Late medieval church courts frequently excommunicated debtors at the request of their creditors. Tyler Lange analyzes over 11,000 excommunications between 1380 and 1530 in order to explore the forms, rhythms, and cultural signifi cance of the practice. Three case studies demonstrate how excommunication for debt facilitated minor transactions in an age of scarce small-denomination coinage and how interest-free loans and sales credits could be viewed as encouraging the relations of charitable exchange that were supposed to exist between members of Christ’s body. Lange also demonstrates how from 1500 or so believers gradually turned away from the practice and toward secular courts, at the same time as they retained the moralized, economically irrational conception of indebtedness we have yet to shake. The demand-driven rise and fall of excommunication for debt reveals how believers began to reshape the institutional Church well before Martin Luther posted his theses.
This article aims to analyze the role of Bernardino López de Carvajal's (1456 Plasencia-1523 Rome) as a literary patron, namely his contributions to humanism in Rome and to Spanish letters, in the period that has been loosely identified as Spanish Rome. Carvajal held the dignities of orator continuus of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, titular cardinal of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, and Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and was even elected antipope with the name of Martin VI in the conciliabulum of Pisa (1511) against Julius II. A cultivated man and a lover of poets, he belonged to the avant-garde of humanists devoted to create a body of Neolatin and Spanish Literature that would both foster the Spanish presence at Rome and leave a mark in the Spanish literary canon. He sponsored a considerable body of works that celebrated the deeds of the Catholic Kings and those of the Great Captain, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. He also commissioned literary translations, and was involved in the production of theatrical pieces, such as those of Baltasar Torres Naharro.
One of the most striking legal developments of the sixteenth century is the emergence of two related challenges to the medieval ius commune. Their target, the pan-European Romano-canonical common law, was based on academic elaborations of Justinian's Corpus iuris civilis, Gratian's Decretum, and succeeding books of papal judgments or decretals. The ius commune offered a wealth of legal principles and models both of legislative sovereignty and of systematic law codes. In the sixteenth century, its primacy-indeed its coherence-was challenged by a humanist school of jurisprudence inspired by the philological criticism of humanist literary scholars. This movement to recover the original, that is, the classical Roman meaning of particular Roman-law provisions, was exemplified in France by the work of Guillaume Budé, Jacques Cujas, and their followers. A closely related movement challenged the medieval legal tradition by denying that Romano-canonical principles were universally applicable. This challenge, evident in the work of Charles Dumoulin, François Hotman, Jean Papon, and Antoine Loisel, and often tied to Protestant rejection of canon law, asserted that Roman laws were irrelevant to France and encouraged the search for the native, authentic principles of French law. These were to be found by synthesizing local customary law, decisions of the sovereign courts, and royal legislation.
With ninety executions of sodomites and a proportion of about 15% of all executions and bodily punishments relating to this offence, Burgundian Bruges (1385–1515) ranks among Europe's most important centres for the repression of sodomy, a mostly hidden aspect of its rich social history. If these figures allow a comparison of the northern commercial metropolis of the late middle ages with some better known Italian cities, such as Venice and Florence, the actions of the authorities charged with the organization of the repression give an insight into the ideological apparatus behind this repression. Bruges occupied a most important position both as an economic centre and as one of the big Flemish cities opposed to princely centralization. It therefore served on several occasions as the ideal setting for the manifestations of the Burgundian theatre-state. The exceptional repression against the illicit form of sexual behaviour par excellence may be linked with the need to control the city and impose state authority.
This article revisits the contribution of Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies by examining the site and tenor of political and constitutional thought in early sixteenth-century France. With the aid of recent French scholarship, it revises previous accounts by considering alternative sites of political thought and the doctrinal sources of constitutional practice. The commentaries of academic jurists offer a range of constitutional theories that informed quotidian litigation over royal power in the king's own courts. The constitutional history of early sixteenth-century France should be redirected away from spectacular public rituals and humanist treatises and towards day-to-day legal practice and its doctrinal basis.
In investigating why France failed to become Protestant, one does not often look at the relation between ecclesiology and political thought. One takes Seyssel to be the exemplar of "medieval constitutionalism" and never accounts for the connection between the ecclesiology and politics of the Parlement and University of Paris. This article will examine this connection through Cosme Guymier's commentary (1486) on the Pragmatic Sanction. Canonist and magistrate, he joined conciliarist political thought to Gallican politics, hinted at the beginnings of what would later unite the absolute monarchy and the Parlement against heresy, and suggested why the Reformation was constitutionally unnecessary in France.
During the 1500s and 1600s when state building in France depended on the government's ability to staff administrative and judicial offices, prime candidates emerged from the famous law schools. Steeped in new research methods favoring a documentary base, Jurists focused legal studies on the French past, rather than a Roman one, and fostered historical and comparative views of society, law, and nation. Searching in archives for customs and laws, they wrote histories tracing the development of French institutions, including the Parlement of Paris, and devised civic rituals to articulate French constitutional precepts in that court. Practicing law as well, they collected “notable arrêts ” (judicial decisions) on questions of law, advanced legal theories and legislative projects, and facilitated the circulation of legal knowledge within a general public caught up in judicial activism born of social change and political necessity. By challenging operative facets of two great legal systems in the western world, Roman law and Canon law, and by amending French Customary law, they developed a system of “French jurisprudence” and legally framed a “civil society” that underwrote the claim to political sovereignty as a nation.