The Council of Bourges, 1225: A Documentary History (review)

Abstract

The Council of Bourges, 1225:A Documentary History.By Richard Kay. [Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West.] (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2002. Pp. xxviii, 599. $114.95.) Except only for the Fourth Lateran Council, the Council of Bourges that met in 1225 was the largest church assembly held in the West up to that time. Summoned by the cardinal-legate Romanus Bonaventura, it was attended by 112 archbishops and bishops, more than 500 abbots, many deans and archdeacons, and over 100 representatives of cathedral chapters. In this important work, the fruit of many years of scholarly labor, Richard Kay explains that the council deserves study, not only because of its size, but the earliest record of representative government in action; as an extended example of counsel and consent in medieval assemblies; and as an episode in the second Albigensian Crusade .The author provides a thorough treatment of all these themes. The first task of the council was to adjudicate the competing claims of Raymond of Toulouse and Amaury of Montfort to the County of Toulouse. When the case had gone against Raymond, the next order of business was to authorize a tax the Church intended to finance a new Albigensian crusade to be undertaken by King Louis VIII. This seems to have been carried through without difficulty, and in January, 1226, Romanus granted to the king a tenth of clerical incomes for five years. But it is not clear who exactly consented to the tax. This contentious issue arose sixteen months later (after the king's death) when the cathedral chapters of four French provinces-Reims, Sens, Rouen, and Tours-balked at paying future installments of the tax the ground that they had not consented to it. Romanus wrote that he had granted the tax on behalf of their proctors and of almost the entire council; the chapters, however, maintained that they had sent nuncios to the council to report back to them concerning its proceedings but without any power to consent their behalf. When the pope decided the case against the chapters he did not address this particular issue, though a few years earlier he had decreed that cathedral chapters did indeed have a right to be represented at provincial councils. In the matter of the tax approved at Bourges he declared that Romanus was empowered to act by virtue of his legatine authority, adding however that the tax had been granted on the advice of almost the entire council. …