The Invention and Spread of Representation and Consent

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter focuses on the invention and spread of representation and consent. It first shows that recent attempts to explain the development of medieval representative institutions have neglected a long-standing insight of medieval and legal historians: political representation and rule by consent were first developed within the Catholic Church following the eleventh-century Gregorian Reforms. These practices then migrated to secular polities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, facilitated by the towering position of the Church in medieval society in general and the ubiquitous ‘areas of interaction’ between religious and lay spheres in particular. The authors use qualitative evidence to document these processes by analysing the initial adoption of proctorial representation and consent at political assemblies, first within the Church, then in lay polities. As a second step, they show how the presence of the mendicant Dominican order (organized from top to bottom based on representation) inspired the development of representative government at the urban level. These findings corroborate recent insights about the importance of religious institutions and diffusion in processes of regime change, and they shed light on the puzzling fact that representation and consent—the core principles of modern democracy—only arose and spread in the Latin West.