A Companion to Giles of Rome, ed. Charles F. Briggs and Peter S. Eardley

Abstract

Giles of Rome (c.1243/7–1316) is now probably most famous for the defence of papal supremacy which was offered in his De ecclesiastica potestate (1302). However, to readers in the later Middle Ages, Giles was perhaps best known for his political treatise, De regimine principum (c.1280). The work survives in almost three hundred Latin manuscripts and was also translated into many vernaculars, including the Middle English version by John Trevisa. John Watts has described the political theory produced in late medieval France and England as being ‘mostly Egidian in its assumptions’ and Giles’s work was also a source for poets such as John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve. Yet, despite the fame of his political works, Giles was, as the editors to this volume note in their introduction, ‘first and foremost a theologian’. An Austin friar and a student of Thomas Aquinas at the University of Paris, Giles became prior general of his order in 1291, with his teachings—both those written and those ‘still to be written’—being adopted as the Austins’ official doctrine; he eventually rose to be archbishop of Bourges In addition to his political and theological works, Giles also wrote widely on philosophy and metaphysics with a number of his works in these fields being studied in the universities. It is surprising, given his medieval influence and modern fame, that this useful collection is the first general survey of Giles’s work. Its eight chapters offer a wide-ranging investigation of Giles’s thought, and the book also includes a chronology of his writings, a list of catalogues of their manuscripts and a bibliography of secondary literature.