Abstract
Prompted in part by Sarah Wood’s article in YLS 21, this essay reconsiders the argument in Conscience’s account of the life of Christ (B.19.26–198). Conscience distinguishes three phases there: as a knight, Filius Marie, up to the first miracle at Cana; as a king, Filius David, in his public ministry and on the cross; and as a conqueror, Christus, at and after the Harrowing of Hell. Wood describes the whole speech as a ‘sermon on Christ’s kingship’; but this is to elide, I argue, distinctions that Conscience is careful to make and, in particular, to obscure the fact that the chief point of the passage in its context lies in its representation of Christ as a conqueror. It is not as a king but as a conqueror that he can cast down or raise up his subjects, and it is this conqueror’s privilege that he deputes to Peter as the power of the keys.
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