Conciliarism, Papalism, and Power, 1511-1518

Abstract

If ‘the later conciliar controversy’ may be regarded as having come to an end by the middle of the fifteenth century, the years considered here may perhaps be seen as the period of the last controversy of quite that kind. It is true that words like ‘first’ and ‘last’ are always hazardous in historical discourse, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the history of ideas. Clearly the argument about the place of general councils in the polity of the Church had not completely died away in the second half of the fifteenth century; nor did it come to a sudden end in 1518 (specified here as the year which saw the Concordat of 1516 reluctantly accepted by the University of Paris and also the publication of John Mair’s Commentary on St Matthew’s Gospel, with its strenuous assertion of conciliarist principles). Twenty years more were to pass before the posthumous publication of the longest single work generated by the entire conciliar controversy, Domenico Giacobazzi’s De concilio. And seven years later it was, of course, a council of the Church that faced the challenge of what had, from small beginnings within the period examined here, become a schism more fundamental and far-reaching than that which had precipitated the original conciliar movement. Even at Trent, moreover, there were those who were prepared to speak up for ‘conciliarist’ principles and policies. Yet it still seems true to say that the years of the Council (or what purported to be the Council) of Pisa and Milan, and of the Fifth Council of the Lateran, saw the last significant and direct confrontation between conciliarism and papalism as those positions had developed in the ecclesiology and ecclesiastical politics of the period inaugurated by the Great Schism. No doubt this last act was an anticlimax, a controversy over the dubious claims of a conciliabulum which was at least politically used if not originally inspired by purely political motives. In the history of ideas, however, and perhaps especially in the history of political ideas, the debate is not so easily dismissed.