The First French Reformation

Church Reform and the Origins of the Old Regime

The political culture of absolute monarchy that structured French soci-ety into the eighteenth century is generally believed to have emerged latein the sixteenth century. This new interpretation of the origins of Frenchabsolutism, however, connects the fifteenth-century conciliar reformmovement in the Catholic Church to the practice of absolutism bydemonstrating that the monarchy appropriated political models derivedfrom canon law. Tyler Lange reveals how the reform of the Churchoffered a crucial motive and pretext for a definitive shift in the practiceand conception of monarchy and explains how this First French Refor-mation enabled Francis I and subsequent monarchs to use the GallicanChurch as a useful deposit of funds and judicial power. In so doing,the book identifies the theoretical origins of later absolutism and thestructural reasons for the failure of French Protestantism.

Tyler Lange currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship in the LOEWEResearch Focus Extrajudicial and Judicial Conflict Resolution,Goethe-Universitat, Frankfurt-am-Main. He is a historian of legal doc-trine and practice in the late medieval and early modern periods whoseresearch focuses on political thought, canon law, serfdom, and credit.

The First French ReformationChurch Reform and the Origins ofthe Old Regime

Tyler LangeGoethe-Universitat, Frankfurt-am-Main

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the Universitys mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit ofeducation, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.orgInformation on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107049369

C Tyler Lange 2014This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exceptionand to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,no reproduction of any part may take place without the writtenpermission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2014

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataLange, Tyler, 1981The first French reformation : church reform and the origins of the old regime /Tyler Lange, Goethe-Universitat, Frankfurt-am-Main.pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-107-04936-9 (hardback)1. Reformation France History 16th century. 2. Reformation France Influence. 3. Monarchy France History. 4. Church and state France History. I. Title.BR370.L37 2014274.406dc23 2013040674

ISBN 978-1-107-04936-9 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy ofURLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publicationand does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,accurate or appropriate.

Piae MemoriaeMaterterae AviaequeSacrum

Contents

Figure and Table page ixAcknowledgments xiAbbreviations xiii

Introduction: The Harvest of Medieval Ecclesiology 1Misogyny and the Canonical Theory of Office 3The Ecclesiology of the Kingdom 12The Fifteenth Century and the Old Regime 19

1 Law and Political Culture in Late Medieval France 25Political Culture 27Political Thought: Canon Law 42From Papalism and Conciliarism to Absolutismand Constitutionalism 52

The Parisian Faculty of Canon Law and the Parlementof Paris 65

2 The True Church Is in the Kingdom of France 78The Idea of Reform in Fifteenth-Century Paris 79Reforming Ecclesiastical Justice 89Reforming Ecclesiastical Property 111

3 Absolute Monarchy and Ministerial Monarchy,15151526 125

Constitutional Politics and the Kings Finances 125The Parlement and Ecclesiastical Patronage 132The Bourbon Succession 137The Regent Louise and Parlementary Constitutionalism 144

4 Heresy and the Absolute Power 161The Threat of Heresy 161The Kings Mandate within the Church 176Heresy Before the Parlement 188

5 The Practice of Sovereignty 211Constitutional Claims in 1527 212The Utility of Constitutionalism 224

vii

viii Contents

Institutionalizing the Absolute Power 232From the Two Powers to the Fundamental Laws 244

Conclusion: The Emergence of the Old Regime 255Venality of Office and the Patrimonial State 256Political Thought from Law to History 259Gallican Crises 264The Harvest of Medieval Ecclesiology in France 267

Bibliography 275Index 295

Figure and Table

Figure

1. Educational Background of Counselors of the Parlement ofParis, 14611547 page 73

Table

1. French Monasteries Secularized between 1475 and 1561 118

ix

Acknowledgments

My journey toward this book began under the guidance of Paul Fried-land at Bowdoin College. It continued under that of Thomas A. Brady,Jr., Carla Hesse, and Laurent Mayali at the University of Califor-nia, Berkeley. I cannot thank Tom, Carla, and Laurent enough. Igratefully recognize the aid of Mary Elizabeth Berry, Elizabeth A. R.Brown, Barbara Diefendorf, Simon Grote, Timothy Hampton, RobertHarkins, Kathryn Jasper, Geoffrey Koziol, Maureen Miller, HannahMurphy, Viar Palsson, Mark Peterson, Orest Ranum, Peter Sahlins,Mark Sawchuk, Ethan Shagan, Jonathan Sheehan, David Spafford, JesseTorgerson, Charity Urbanski, and the readers for Cambridge Univer-sity Press. I am indebted in different ways to Patrick Arabeyre, RobertDescimon, and especially Frederic Gabriel. Alain Guery, FrancoiseHildesheimer, Dominique Iogna-Prat, Corinne Leveleux, and IsabelleStorez-Brancourt offered occasions to rethink aspects of the book. Thegentlemen of Aviron Marne et Joinville, none of whom will ever reada page of this, and Lithe Sebesta, who may, kept me tied to the pale,cold world outside of the archives in Paris. In the Bay Area, that servicewas provided by my good friends at the Marin Rowing Association. Maythose whom I have forgotten find recognition in my footnotes.The Georges Lurcy Foundation, the Department of History of the

University of California, Berkeley, under the inspired leadership of MaryElizabeth Berry and Ethan Shagan, and the Robbins Collection underthe equally inspired direction of Laurent Mayali generously funded myresearch.I owe particular debts tomy parents, to RebeccaMoyle, and tomy chil-

dren. They can receive my thanks. Bernadette Cowan and in particularJo Ann Cowan, who is the source of my passion for history, cannot.

xi

Abbreviations

AN Archives Nationales, ParisAuth. Authenticum or authentica of the Corpus iuris

civilisBN Bibliothe`que Nationale, ParisC Causa of the DecretumClem. Clementinae constitutionesCod. CodexD Distinctio of the DecretumDig. Digestum vetus, Digestum novum, InfortiatumExtr. comm. Extravagantes communesExtr. Jo. XXII. Extravagantes Joannis XXIIFournier and Dorez Fournier and Dorez, eds. La Faculte de Decret

au XVe sie`cle. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale,1913. 3 vols.

Guymier Cosme Guymier. Pragmatica Sanctio cumConcordatis. Cosme Guymier Clarissimi SenatusParisiensis. Consiliarii solennis et eruditusCommentarius ad Pragmaticam Sanctionem.Paris, 1532.

Inst. InstitutionesIsambert Isambert, Jourdan, and Decrusy, eds. Recueil

general des anciennes lois francaises, depuis lan420 jusqua` la revolution de 1789. Paris:Belin-Leprieur/Verdie`re, 1825. 29 vols.

lt livres tournois . . . sous . . . deniers . . .Mansi Joannes Dominicus Mansi et al., eds. Sacrorum

conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio. Paris:Hubert Welter, 1902. 57 vols.

Maugis Edouard Maugis. Histoire du Parlement de Parisde lave`nement des rois Valois a` la mort dHenriIV. Paris, 19131916; New York: BurtFranklin, 1967. 3 vols.

xiii

xiv Abbreviations

PL Patrologiae cursus completus . . . Series latina. Ed.J.-P. Migne. Paris: Garnier, 18781904.382 vols.

VI Liber sextusX Liber extra

IntroductionThe Harvest of Medieval Ecclesiology

The political culture that structured French society into the eighteenthcentury is generally taken to have emerged late in the sixteenth cen-tury. I propose instead that absolutism, understood as a political culturebased on practices of monarchy borrowed from the late medieval Churchthrough canon law, developed prior to the Wars of Religion (15621598)and had less to do with elites fears of social collapse or the reception ofBodinian and humanistic notions of sovereignty than with fears of heresyand the reception of canonical theories of monarchy within a legal pub-lic sphere. The same practice of monarchy and the same conception ofpolitical society underlay both sixteenth-century juridical absolutism andseventeenth-century fiscal absolutism. This transformation of the con-ception and practice ofmonarchy at the end of theMiddle Ages precludeda successful Protestant Reformation in France and laid the groundworkfor the absolute monarchy. It is time to consider religious motives forthe emergence of a practice of absolute monarchy and structural reasonsfor the failure of French Protestantism rooted in the fifteenth-centurymovement to reform the Church.During the reign of Francis I (b. 1494, r. 15151547), the conjoint

action of the monarch and the Parlement of Paris consolidated a prac-tice of absolutism that had developed over the previous century alongthe axis of church reform and with the aid of canonical theories ofsovereignty. The structures of the monarchy and the discursive formsthat manifested this new political culture of orthodoxy and sovereigntywould last until the eighteenth century, when, in the words of KeithBaker, the symbolic representations upon which . . . the sense of themonarch as the sacred center of the corporate social order, express-ing its very ground of being as the public person in whom a multiplic-ity of parts became one, . . . depended[,] had been rendered increasinglyproblematic by changing discursive practices.1 Baker touches on three

1 Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1990), 9. Baker defines political culture on pp. 45 as the set of discourses or

1

2 Introduction

topics indispensable to understanding the foundations of absolutism: thenotion of the monarchs sacrality, the idea of a social order of bodiesdefined by privileges emanating from the sovereign, and the conceptof a public person, which assumes some distinction between publicand private. I would expand Bakers reference to discursive prac-tices to include social or cultural practices understood more broadly,in light of subsequent works that restore elements of social causationto the Revolution. Cultural practices, encompassing religious sensibil-ities and political culture, had a role as much in the birth of the OldRegime as in its death. Both absolutism and the French Reformationsprang from the political and religious sensibilities of late-fifteenth- andearly-sixteenth-century France, from the desire for reform characteristicof the PreReformation and from the contemporaneous intensifica-tion of the imperial monarchy through a political culture created withthe aid of the practices and theories of papal monarchy.2 The desire forreform caused both a reformation of the monarchy and a reformationof the Gallican church, because, as Jonathan Powis has observed, thecharacter of Gallican institutions and publicity made it hard to considernational interests . . . except in relation to an ecclesiastical polity whichwas by definition Catholic.3 Jotham Parsons points out that this dualreformation reflects the inability to imagine either a deinstitutionalizedChristianity or a de-Christianized state.4 The First French Reforma-tion was not a theological reformation but a political, legal, and socialreordering of monarchy and Church accomplished in the century after1438.5

The debt of early modern monarchies to the papal monarchy forpractices of government and constitutional theories is clear, but themodes of transmission are not always evident.6 Even though Roman-law

symbolic practices by which the . . . claims of individuals and groups in any society[are] articulate[d], negotiate[d], implement[ed], and enforce[d].

2 Augustin Renaudet, Prereforme et humanisme a` Paris pendant les premie`res guerres dItalie,14941517, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie dArgences, 1953); Jean-Marie Le Gall, Les moinesau temps des reformes: France, 14801560 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2001); Jacques Krynen,LEmpire du roi: Idees et croyances politiques en France, XIIIeXVe sie`cle (Paris: Gallimard,1993).

3 Jonathan Powis, Gallican Liberties and the Politics of Later Sixteenth-Century France,The Historical Journal, 26, no. 3 (Sept. 1983), 515530.

4 JothamParsons,The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in RenaissanceFrance (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 183.

5 On its religious aspects, see J. Michael Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields, Six Hun-dred Years of Reform: Bishops and the French Church, 11901789 (Montreal/Kingston:McGill-Queens University Press, 2005), 63102.

6 Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 12001600: Sovereignty and Rights in theWestern Legal Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Misogyny and the Canonical Theory of Office 3

jurisprudence and humanism are often identified as the wellsprings ofabsolutism,7 Roman law was not necessarily absolutist. Furthermore,the movement I describe is essentially pre-humanist, only reinforcedby the arrival of a humanistically trained generation of legal practition-ers in the 1530s. Even as the political culture I describe crumbled, latemedieval practices of papal sovereignty continued to shape the practiceof absolute monarchy: Daniel Jousses Traite de lAdministration de la Jus-tice of 1771 drew on Prospero Farinaccis Variae Quaestiones of 1589 todiscuss the prosecution of le`se-majeste.8 Jousses work in turn shaped therevolutionary crime of le`se-nation, which in particularly Bakerian fash-ion essentially substituted the new sovereign, the Nation, for the formersovereign, the king, in a Romano-canonical framework. Farinacci (15541618) had been criminal lieutenant of the Auditor-General of the Apos-tolic Chamber and criminal prosecutor of Rome, and thus responsible fortrying crimes against the majesty of its papal monarch. Jousse assumedthe equivalence of the king of France as a monarch to the pope and elab-orated the legal regime of the French monarchy in terms derived fromthe adaptation of Roman-law principles to the papal monarchy. Suchborrowing furnishes the missing link in telescoped assertions that earlymodern monarchs imagined themselves in terms taken from discussionsof the papal monarchy. It demonstrates how such claims were realizedthrough their application in legal procedures, in the creation of newpractices and new models of government on the basis of borrowing fromcanon law. This study examines how such borrowing created the FrenchOld Regime monarchy as the result of universal calls for reform of theChurch at the end of the Middle Ages. The resulting practices and insti-tutions of absolutist government were not unopposed, though pressuresfor reform and for the defense of orthodoxy ultimately precluded a suc-cessful Protestant Reformation in France and undermined any resistanceto what would become the Old Regime practice and theory of monarchy.

Misogyny and the Canonical Theory of Office

The influence of canonical theories of office on debates over successionto the French throne offers a clear example of the relation of canonical

7 Myron Gilmore, Argument from Roman Law in Political Thought, 12001600 (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941); William Church, Constitutional Thoughtin Sixteenth-Century France: A Study in the Evolution of Ideas (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1941).

8 Daniel Jousse, Traite de lAdministration de la Justice, 2 vols. (Paris: Debure pe`re, 1771),e.g., II:98, 104, 623 (this case contradicting Farinaccis procedural recommendation),and 639.

4 Introduction

theories of the Church to constitutional practice. The conquest of gov-ernment by legal technicians, many clerical and many trained in bothcanon and civil law, brought a mindset in which the power to rule wasimagined as an office rather than an inheritance, as in the postGregorianChurch. The importance of theories of office has been demonstratedmost famously in the case of the Salic Law, with which late-fourteenth-century jurists scrambled to justify the exclusion of female heirs from theFrench throne in 1316 and 1328.9 The connection is explicit in a speechgiven in 1435 by Jean Juvenal des Ursins (13881473), former kingsattorney or avocat du roi in the Parlement of Paris, bishop of Laon, futurearchbishop of Reims, son of a president in the Parlement, and brotherof a Chancellor of France. In this defense of Charles VIIs claim to thethrone against that of Henry V of England, couched as an allegoricaldialogue, France argued:

Given that it is a manly office to be king of France, a woman may neither be kingnor possess me, since women are barred from all virile offices. And it appears,everything considered, that to maintain that a woman by succession or otherwisemight come to my crown is as great an error as asserting that a woman couldbe dean of a cathedral church I would not dare to say pope or bishop , sincethe king of France once consecrated is a cleric, and the first of his kingdom afterthe pope. One would not suffer a woman to be a bailliff or provost, which areoffices of justice.10

Juvenal des Ursinss examples concern either clerical or judicial offices,that is, either priests or priests of justice. He assumed that kingship wasan office like those offices, describing the succession to the monarchy interms derived from theories of ecclesiastical and judicial offices. Juvenaldes Ursins thus continued that the kingdom is not an inheritance, buta dignity pertaining to the entire commonwealth; there is no succes-sion to dignities as there is for inheritances, since women may not holddignities.11 At the Estates General of 1484, the Burgundian noblemanPhilippe Pot repeated this without the gender restrictions: the kingdomis a dignity, not an inheritance.12 The distinction between an office anda patrimonial inheritance meant that the monarchy was governed by the

9 Ralph Giesey, Le role meconnu de la loi salique. La succession royale XIVeXVIe sie`cles(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007), and The Juristic Basis of Dynastic Right to theFrench Throne, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 51, no.5 (1961), 347.

10 P. S. Lewis and A.-M. Hayez (eds.), Ecrits politiques de Jean Juvenal des Ursins, 3 vols.(Paris: Klincksieck 1978), I:162163.

11 Lewis and Hayez (eds.), Ecrits politiques, I:164165.12 Jean Masselin, Diarium statuum generalium Franciae, habitum Turonibus anno 1484, reg-

nante Carolo octavo (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1835), 146.

Misogyny and the Canonical Theory of Office 5

rules of the canonical theory of office. As the Nmois jurist Jean de Ter-revermeille had held sixty years before Pot, in a treatise defending thefuture Charles VIIs right to the throne despite having been disinheritedby his insane father, because kingship was a dignity or office rather thanan inheritance, what appeared to be hereditary succession was in factlegal, customary devolution that only gave the appearance of hereditarysuccession.13 What at first glance appears to be mere misogyny servingthe partisan interests of Charles VII (b. 1403, r. 14221461) in fact sig-nals the hidden canonical foundations here the theory of office ofearly modern theories of monarchy. An increasingly strong emphasis onthe kings status as an anointed, clerical person evident from the reign ofCharles V (b. 1338, r. 13641380) can only have favored the adoptionof canonical theories of monarchy.14

A half-century ago, Ernst Kantorowicz elegantly demonstrated thecontribution of the canonical theory of office to what he and Carl Schmittcalled political theology butmight more accurately be denominated theecclesiology of the kingdom.15 Although many historians have sincereferred to Kantorowiczs seminal work, they have mainly limited them-selves to indiscriminately applying the theory of the two-bodied king, alegal fiction fully realized only in a specific situation in later-sixteenth-century England. It has been demonstrated, conclusively to my mind,that the king of France did not, juridically speaking, have two bodiesin this period, elements of the royal funeral ceremony during the longsixteenth century aside.16 Even so, Kantorowiczs work still has consid-erable implications for the study of the French Old Regime, pointing ustoward the occult foundations of the Old Regime monarchy. By recov-ering the deeper constitutional significance of Jean de Terrevermeilles,

13 Joannes de Terra Rubea,Contra rebelles suorum regum (Lyon, 1526), 10r, 11r, 16rv; JeanBarbey, La fonction royale: essence et legitimite dapre`s lesTractatus de Jean de Terrevermeille(Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1983).

14 Stephen Perkinson, The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late MedievalFrance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 286; Carra Ferguson OMeara,Monarchy and Consent: The Coronation Book of Charles V of France (London: HarveyMiller, 2001), 116119, 237.

15 Tyler Lange, Lecclesiologie du royaume de France: Lheresie devant le Parlement deParis dans les annees 1520. Bulletin du Centre dEtudes medievales dAuxerre, Hors-serien7 (2013): http://cem.revues.org/12785.

16 Alain Boureau, Le Simple corps du roi. Limpossible sacralite des souverains francais, XVeXVIIIe sie`cles (Paris: Les Editions de Paris, 1988); Tyler Lange, Constitutional Thoughtand Constitutional Practice in Early Sixteenth-Century France: Revisiting the Legacyof Ernst Kantorowicz, Sixteenth Century Journal, XLII:4 (2011), 10031026; RalphGiesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva: Droz, 1960); E. A.R. Brown, The French Royal Funeral Ceremony and the Kings Two Bodies: ErnstH. Kantorowicz, Ralph E. Giesey, and the Construction of a Paradigm, Micrologus 22(2014), 132.

6 Introduction

Jean Juvenal des Ursinss, and Philippe Pots words, we learn that thecanonical theory of office was not unidirectional, tending only to the the-ory of a two-bodied king as it did in sixteenth-century England, and canreappraise the contribution of late medieval ecclesiology to the practiceand theory of the early modern monarchy in France. We may then revisenarratives of constitutional and political history that give toomuch weightto Roman law, misogyny, or class interest in the origins of absolutism.17

Ideals alone do indeed sometimesmove humans to act, even if they some-times happen to coincide with material interests. Rarely will humans dis-pense entirely with at least invoking ideals. Studying those ideals, whetherone takes historical actors at their word or seeks deeper motivationsas well, reveals the intellectual structures of a given period. In our case,misogyny appears to be the consequence of a constitutional position one that nevertheless accorded with late medieval prejudices.As to Roman law, at least in the monarchies of Northern Europe,

its impact was mediated through canon law until the humanist turn injurisprudence.18 The story I tell is mainly prior to the impact of human-ist jurisprudence in France. Of early humanist jurists, Guillaume Bude(14681540) did not teach and Jean Pyrrhus dAngleberme (c.14801521) died early. Only with the generation that came to maturity in the1530s did humanist textual critique (themos gallicus) transform the teach-ing and practice of law. In contrast, medieval jurists interpreted Romanlaw according to medieval categories and to medieval purposes, althoughthe chains of interpretation governing the bare citation of textual loci arenot always included. As Brian Tierney has observed of a later period:

The use of ancient sources by seventeenth-century authors may sometimesobscure the actual medieval basis of their thought. . . . [W]hen an early mod-ern author cited Matthew 18.17 as an argument for popular government orCod. 5.59.5 (Quod omnes tangit) as an argument for political consent, he wasattributing to the ancient texts meanings that had been imprinted on them by

17 Sarah Hanley, TheMonarchic State in EarlyModern France: Marital Regime Govern-ment and Male Right, in A. Bakos (ed.), Politics, Ideology and the Law in Early ModernEurope: Essays in Honor of J. H. M. Salmon (Rochester, New York: Rochester UniversityPress, 1994), 107126; Christopher Stocker, The Politics of the Parlement of Paris in1525, French Historical Studies 8, no. 2 (Autumn, 1973), 191212, and Public andPrivate Enterprise in the Administration of a Renaissance Monarchy: The First Salesof Office in the Parlement of Paris (15121524), Sixteenth Century Journal 9, no. 2(July 1978), 429; Henry Heller, Iron and Blood: Civil Wars in Sixteenth-Century France(Montreal: McGill/Queens University Press, 1991).

18 Andre Gouron, Le droit commun a-t-il ete lheritier du droit romain? Comptes-rendusdes seances de lAcademie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 142, no. 1 (1998), 283292;Jean-Louis Halperin: La determination du champ juridique a` la lumie`re de travauxrecents dhistoire du droit, Droit et societe 81 (2012), 405423.

Misogyny and the Canonical Theory of Office 7

medieval experience. . . . Seventeenth-century writers were often thinking medi-eval thoughts even when they clothed them in classical dress.19

Many crucial Roman-law theories of sovereignty, of majority rulein voting, of representation, and so on were in fact developed for theChurch and were colored by the meaning and use they had acquired inthat institutional context.20 It was in the administrative law developed forthe Church out of pieces of repurposed Roman law that warring prin-cipalities bent on acquiring supremacy within their territories found amodel of comprehensive, absolute sovereignty. Although not discount-ing the role of war and its financing or of state expansion as a strategyfor augmenting noble revenues through the regressive redistribution ofnational wealth,21 my account focuses on the importance of the religiousmotives encouraged by reliance on prescriptions of canon law, connectinglate medieval church reform to early modern absolutism.The practice and theory of monarchy in Old Regime France were

fundamentally shaped by canonical theories of monarchy, law, and jus-tice. Political culture was shaped by canonical constitutionalism. In thewords of Paul Ourliac, whether it concerns the Fundamental Laws orsovereignty, it is clear that sixteenth-century political theorists appliedto the king what the canonists had written of the sovereign pontiff.22

It was natural that sixteenth-century constitutional thought recapitu-late fifteenth-century debates on the papal monarchy, given that latemedieval academics tended to discuss the papacy and the Church as the

19 Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought 11501650 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 104105. Cary Nederman excessively crit-icizes this passage, condemning Tierney and the other Neo-Figgisites Francis Oakleyand Kenneth Pennington: Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations along theMedieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel (Washington, DC: Catholic Uni-versity of America Press, 2009), 910, 2948.

20 Gabriel Le Bras, Les origines canoniques du droit administratif, in Levolution dudroit public: Etudes en lhonneur dAchille Mestre (Paris: Sirey, 1956), 395412; PierreLegendre, Du droit prive au droit public: Nouvelles observations sur le mandat chez lescanonistes classiques, inMemoires de la Societe pour lHistoire duDroit et des Institutions desanciens pays bourguignons, comtois et romands 30e Fascicule (19701971), 735; LaurentMayali, Romanitas and Medieval Jurisprudence in Lex et Romanitas: Essays for AlanWatson (Berkeley, California: Robbins Collection, 2000), 121138.

21 Albert Rigaudie`re, Penser et construire lEtat dans la France du Moyen Age (XIIIeXVesie`cle (Paris: Comite pour lhistoire economique et financie`re de la France, 2003), esp.Lessor de la fiscalite royale, 523589; Guy Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy andSociety in Eastern Normandy, c. 13001550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1984).

22 Paul Ourliac, Souverainete et lois fondamentales dans le droit canonique du XVesie`cle, in Etudes dhistoire du droit medieval (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1979), 565; HarroHopfl, Fundamental Law and the Constitution in Sixteenth-Century France, inR. Schnur (ed.), Die Rolle der Juristen bei der Entstehung des modernen Staates (Berlin:Duncker und Humblot, 1986), 327356.

8 Introduction

monarchy or the political community par excellence, making ecclesiologythe primary form of political thought in pre-humanist Northern Europeand the one most easily applied to royal administrations by clerical andlay administrators trained in one or both learned laws.23 The relationbetween ecclesiastical and secular constitutional theories was not simpleor uncomplicated, however, for there was not a single canonical consti-tutionalism but rather a multiplicity of constitutional positions separableinto two principal strains of canonical theories of monarchy.24 The papal-ist strain, derived from thirteenth-century polemics but fully developedin the fifteenth century as a response to the challenge to papal superioritywithin the Church posed by the Councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basel,envisioned a monarch who incarnated the entire ecclesiastical polity andwhose divine powers were limited by no earthly power.25 From the year1500 or so in Northern Europe, this strain was reinforced by humanist,Senecan discourse of absolute monarchy that effectively transfer[red]the custodial function of external laws from governing the exercise ofpolitical power to the person of the prince himself, evident in Eras-muss advice to the young Charles V or Guillaume Budes to FrancisI.26 The conciliarist strain, derived from the application of the canonicaltheory of corporate bodies to the Church, envisioned a papal monarchat the service of the community whose powers were legally, morally, and

23 J. H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship, and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy, 14001525 (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1992), 15. On the Church as a polity, Michael Wilks, see The Problemof Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: The Papal Monarchy with Augustinus Triumphusand the Publicists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). On clerical adminis-trators, see Jean-Louis Gazzaniga, Les eveques de Louis XI and Les clercs au servicede letat dans le France du XVe sie`cle a` la lecture de travaux recents, in LEglise deFrance a` la fin du Moyen Age, 3550, 75100; Cedric Michon, La Crosse et le Sceptre: lesprelats detat sous Francois Ier et Henri VIII (Paris: Tallandier, 2008).

24 The terms conciliarism and papalism are means of characterizing affinities amonglate medieval views of monarchy. I intend them less synchronically than Arthur Lovejoysunit-ideas and with more attention to practical politics than Quentin Skinners ideasin context. Grounding political thought in political practice confirms the existence ofpapalist and conciliarist tendencies in ecclesiopolitics and institutional practices. I agreethat the conceptual distinction between conciliar and papal theories of government is auseful heuristic tool to select and arrange the evidence for the history ofmedieval politicalthought, without going so far as to assert that there can be no history of the conciliartheory . . . because no such thing as the conciliar theory was ever an historical reality:Constantin Fasolt, Council and Hierarchy: The Political Thought of William Durant theYounger (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991), 328319, cited byNederman,Lineages of European Political Thought, 37.

25 Wilks, Problem of Sovereignty; Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 11501350, AStudy on the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty, and Tradition in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed.(Leiden: Brill, 1988).

26 Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2007), 41.

Misogyny and the Canonical Theory of Office 9

institutionally limited.27 Papalism might be summarized with the oft-repeated words of the thirteenth-century canonist Laurentius Hispanus:as with God, there is no one in the world who might say to [the pope],why do you do this? As God on earth, the popes will stood for reasonand his judgment was Gods judgment.28 Conciliarism might be sum-marized with the neat phrase: the pope is greater in authority than anyindividual Christian but lesser in authority than the Church as a whole,the Church as a whole being represented in the General Council.29

Such theories were clearly applicable to secular monarchies, as theinitial example of the application of one aspect of the canonical theory ofoffice to the royal succession in France suggests. In Paris, the fifteenth-century center of conciliarist theology and canonical jurisprudence, themonarchy came to envision its powers in papalist terms, whereas theParlement of Paris, chief appellate court with administrative powers forNorthern France, came to see the French constitution in conciliaristterms. This dissension concerning the extent of royal and parlementaryauthority generated a constant low-level constitutional conflict betweena king and the Parlement. Thus, even as the Parlement expanded thekings authority, it endeavored to limit his actions, justifying itself, as weshall see, with the language of conciliarist constitutionalism invoked byJean Juvenal des Ursins in 1435 and Philippe Pot in 1484.30 Accordingly,

27 Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the MedievalCanonists from Gratian to the Great Schism (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968);Antony Black, Council and Commune: The Conciliar Movement and the Fifteenth-CenturyHeritage (London: Burns and Oates, 1978); Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition:Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 13001870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2003); Patrick Arabeyre, Le spectre du conciliarisme chez les juristes francais du XVeet du debut du XVIe sie`cle, in P. Arabeyre and Brigitte Basdevant-Gaudemet (eds.),Les clercs et les princes. Docrines et pratiques de lautorite ecclesiastique a` lepoque moderne(Paris: Ecole nationale de Chartes, 2013), 221237.

28 Pennington quotes the first and second phrases, in which the canonist speaks of the popeas the princeps, citing the Codex and Institutions: Prince and the Law, 46. Hostiensis,Summa aurea ad X.1.32 (Turin, 1963; repr. Venice, 1574), 326b, and Philippus Decius,Consilia sive Responsa (Venice, 1570) II: 524v, repeat the first phrase. The second comesfrom Juvenal, Satires VI: 223. Wilks quotes the third from Augustinus Triumphus:Problem of Sovereignty, 469.

29 An elegant phrase apparently created by Otto von Gierke, Johannes Althusius und dieEntwicklung der naturrechtlichen Staatstheorien (Berlin: Verlag Marcus, 1902), 144 n.62,on the basis of passages in the Vindiciae contra tyrannos (Basel, 1579), 85 and 114,and quoted in Ernst Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval PoliticalTheology (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957), 231 n.117.

30 Royal authority was expanded by and through the Parlement: see PierreChaplais, SomeDocuments Regarding the Fulfilment and Interpretation of the Treaty of Bretigny(13611369): II. The Opinions of the Doctors of Bologna on the Sovereignty ofAquitaine (1369): A Source of the Songe du vergier, Camden Miscellany XIX, 3rdSeries, 80 (1952), 5178; Jean Hilaire, La procedure civile et linfluence de lEtat.Autour de lappel, in J. Krynen and A. Rigaudie`re (eds.), Droits savants et pratiques

10 Introduction

in 1515, the court wrote Louise of Savoy, regent for her son Francis Iduring his first, victorious Italian campaign:

My lady, because, among other powers, the said lord has granted by the saidletters [of regency] that you might confer benefices open to royal appointmentand because we have always held as law in this kingdom that the power to conferthe said benefices is so close and tied to the Crown that the king may not delegateit to any other person however close to him, for this reason, we very humblyentreat you that it please you to confer no [benefices] but to leave them to thedisposition of the said lord.31

The Parlement denied that Louise could nominate to ecclesiastical officeswithin the kings gift, in spite of her sons express permission declared inletters patent. Because it believed monarchy to be an office at the serviceof the commonwealth and likewise believed that the office of king wasgoverned by the rules of ecclesiastical office, it rejected Louises capac-ity to confer benefices. The court applied the Parisian canonist CosmeGuymiers 1486 statement concerning appointments to benefices thatwhen a certain quality is required in some matter to make it operativeand that quality is lacking, the act is invalid.32 Louise clearly lackedthe quality of maleness required to exercise the powers of the king ofFrance concerning appointments to vacant benefices. The Parlement alsoclaimed that such powers could not be delegated, thus counteracting thepapalist tendency to treat all authority as deriving from the prince andto circumvent institutional barriers to the princely will through extraor-dinary commissions. Of course, the Parlements arguments served itslong-term constitutional and more immediate political goals of beatingback royal control of appointments within the Church and of limitingthe monarchy to what the Parlement judged to be its proper role. TheParlement may also have been uncertain about Louises capacity as royalpatron owing to the belief in the kings quasi-clerical status evident inJuvenal des Ursinss speech. In any case, the court used Louises wom-anhood as a wedge to drive apart papalist and conciliarist conceptionsof monarchy. The canonical theory of office, applied to the monarchy,

francaises du pouvoir (XIeXVe) (Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1992),151160; Sophie Petit-Renaud, Faire loy au royaume de France de Philippe VI a` CharlesV (13281380) (Paris: De Boccard, 2001).

31 Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter AN), X1a9324 no.12 (September 6, 1515).32 Guymier illustrated this principle with the examples of a theologal prebend, the benefice

reserved for a graduate in theology within each cathedral chapter, and of retrait lignager,the custom by which relatives could purchase a lineage property sold by a family mem-ber. Each action required a certain quality, respectively a degree in theology or member-ship in a lineage: Cosme Guymier, Pragmatica Sanctio cum Concordatis. Cosme GuymierClarissimi Senatus Parisiensis. Consiliarii solennis et eruditus Commentarius ad PragmaticamSanctionem (Paris, 1532), 90v.

Misogyny and the Canonical Theory of Office 11

here supported the Parlements view of the proper order or constitutionin Church and in State.The sources of the following narrative come primarily from the records

of the Parlement of Paris. This reflects the Parlements unique function inmediating the juridical theories and the political practices of papalmonar-chy as well as the courts unique role in shaping the exercise of royal powerthrough its decisions and through its sometimes selective enforcement ofroyal legislation. Marie Houllemare has recently described it as a publicforum, the privileged site of political experimentation.33 Originating injudicial sessions of the kings Council in the thirteenth century, by the latefifteenth century the Parlement was a body of university-trained juristswho heard cases on appeal and occasionally in the first instance in theroyal palace on the Ile de la Cite.34 Even though the creation of regionalParlements had restricted the geographic extent of its jurisdiction, itremained the highest appellate court for much of Northern France. Ithad also, by claiming a constitutional position analogous to that of theRoman Senate, arrogated to itself the capacity to control royal legislationby refusing to publish or record it as authoritative in the courts regis-ters. The court exercised administrative powers within its region as well,going so far as to create a special commission to organize the defense ofthe Picard frontier in 15241525, which the Regents government hadneglected.35 The roughly 120 magistrates of the Parlement were con-siderable figures, both for their immense political and legal weight andfor their individual wealth and influence.36 No other judge in contem-porary Europe approached the prestige and authority of a parlementarymagistrate. Indeed, the kings courts constituted with taxation the prin-cipal points of contact between the king of France and his subjects.

33 Marie Houllemare, Politiques de la parole: le parlement de Paris au XVIe sie`cle (Geneva:Droz, 2011), 562.

34 Edouard Maugis, Histoire du Parlement de Paris de lave`nement des rois Valois a` la mortdHenri IV, 3 vols. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1967; reprint of Paris, 19131916); FelixAubert, Histoire du Parlement de Paris de lorigine a` Francois Ier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1894);J. H. Shennan,The Parlement of Paris (Ithaca,NewYork: Cornell University Press, 1968);Francoise Autrand, Naissance dun grand corps detat: Les gens du Parlement de Paris,13451454 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1981); Sylvie Daubresse, MoniqueMorgat-Bonnet, and Isabelle Storez-Brancourt (eds.), Le Parlement en exil ou Histoirepolitique et judiciaire des translations du Parlement de Paris (XVeXVIIIe sie`cle) (Paris:Honore Champion, 2007); Sylvie Daubresse, Le Parlement de Paris ou la voix de la raison(15591589) (Geneva: Droz, 2005); Houllemare, Politiques.

35 Roger Doucet, Etude sur le Gouvernement de Francois Ier dans ses rapports avec le Parlementde Paris, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1921, 1926), II:15116.

36 Autrand, Naissance dun grand corps; Nancy Lyman Roelker, One King, One Faith:The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1996).

12 Introduction

The Parlements decisions concerning taxes, royal acts, and subjectsrights shaped the public image of the monarchy and the polity. Themanner in which the court exercised its royal jurisdiction was thereforecrucial.For the period in question, c. 1440 to c. 1540, the courts records

are divided into registers of collective debates and decisions (registres duconseil ), of pleadings, of judgments, of accords, and of criminal proceed-ings. The last are, however, a fictive archival series confected of at leasttwo series of criminal proceedings and judgments. In addition, clerks didnot always neatly record matters in the proper register. Without a clearsense of public law or administrative procedure, materials concerningthe monarchy can be found in both criminal and civil records. Becausethe court did not motivate or cite legal justifications for its decisionsso as to reflect the kings absolute authority unbound by laws inthe pursuit of equity the pleadings offer an indispensable if problematicaccess to the magistrates mental world. Thin before 1450 and again after1550, when they can sometimes be supplemented with printed legal fac-tums, they contain the legal arguments and citations invoked by avocatsbefore the court, including Roman laws, papal decretals, commentaries,precedents, and royal edicts. By comparing arguments to the courts pro-visional and final decisions, one may cautiously identify which argumentsand which legal authorities the judges found convincing. Finally, it mustbe noted that many cases did not proceed to final judgment, depriving thehistorian of a definitive record of the outcome. I supplement my inves-tigation of the courts mental world with letters to and from importantindividuals, royal legislation, and works of theology and law. Because myfocus is on the emergence of a new political culture in the legal sphere andbecause the political history of Francis Is reign has been more than ade-quately established, I do not spend much time with royal correspondenceor documents concerning courtiers. I use the records of the extraordi-nary justice, above all the Grand Conseil, when necessary to illuminatethe relationship between the institutions manifesting the kings absoluteand ordinary powers. Examining the legal, social, and political context ofthe practice of the Parlement of Paris will reveal the lost ecclesiologicaland canonical background to the establishment of practices of absolutemonarchy in sixteenth-century France.

The Ecclesiology of the Kingdom

The monarchy that developed in early modern France was not a con-stitutional but an absolute one, despite the Parlement of Pariss evidentresistance to absolutism in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The Ecclesiology of the Kingdom 13

Explaining the path to this outcome brings us to the debated concept ofabsolutism. Much historiographical energy has been expended definingor resisting its utility.37 I keep close to the terms juridical roots. Althoughthe word is of modern provenance, the concept derives from the initiallytheological distinction between Gods ordinary or ordained power (potes-tas ordinaria or ordinata) and absolute or extraordinary power (potestasabsoluta or extraordinaria).38 This was not meant to imply that God hadtwo powers but to provide a manner of discussing Gods power thataccommodated both omnipotence and foreknowledge. Gods power wasordained or limited temporally, with respect to his foreknowledge, but itwas unlimited or absolute atemporally with respect to his omnipotence.More concretely, although ordinarily God abided by the terms of hiscovenant and by the laws of nature implicit in his creation, as an all-powerful being he could derogate from those laws when he so willed.This distinction between modalities of divine power was reified as it wasapplied first to the popes and then to the kings power. The debate overthe absolute power turned on whether earthly monarchs could properlyuse it, on whether their will was, likeGods, by definition rational and just.If the pope and the king were administrators for the commonwealth, thentheir power was necessarily not absolute but bound by the requirementof governing for the common good and perhaps by the terms of theircovenant with the community.39 If the pope and the king were Godsrepresentatives on earth, then their power was absolute, limited by noearthly law or institution. They would then be Pseudo-Dionysian hierar-chs rather than Aristotelian ministerial kings. This absolutist current waslater reinforced by the humanist visions of absolute monarchy derivedfrom Senecas De clementia evident in Guillaume Budes description ofkings as human Joves.40 The juridical absolutism of which I speakheld within itself the logic of royal power that produced the practicalabsolutism of the seventeenth century.

37 Inter alia, Fanny Cosandey and Robert Descimon, Labsolutisme en France: Histoire ethistoriographie (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2002); David Parker, The Social Foundationof French Absolutism, 16101630, Past and Present 53 (1971): 6788; William Beik,The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration, Past and Present 188 (2005),195224.

38 William Courtenay, Capacity and Volition: A History of the Distinction of Absolute andOrdained Power (Bergamo: P. Lubrina, 1990); Francis Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant,and Order: An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, New York:Cornell University Press, 1984).

39 Antony Black,Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy,14301450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

40 Guillaume Bude, Annotationes Gulielmi Budaei Parisiensis, secretarii regii, in quattuor etviginti Pandectarum libros, ad Ioannem Deganaium Cancellarium Franciae (Paris: RobertEstienne, 1535), 91.

14 Introduction

The binome of extraordinary and ordinary is also to be found in otherarenas. This is confusing, because it was used in an analogous way indifferent senses throughout the period under study. Romano-canonicalprocedure distinguished between the longer, more public ordinary pro-cedure, derived from the procedural model or ordo reconstructed by theSchool of Bologna on the basis of Roman law and the more expedi-tious, summary extraordinary procedure.41 In matters of state finance,accounts distinguished the monarchs ordinary or domanial revenuesfrom the extraordinary revenues deriving principally from the taille andthe aides. Extraordinary levies, originally temporary grants of the Estates,had by our period become regular forms in fact the principal form ofFrench taxation. The distinction between ordinary and extraordinary isin the end amanner of speaking about power. It entails, as Francis Oakleyhas pointed out, a model of power based on promise and will rather thana necessary, natural order.42 The application of a model of the naturalor constitutional order based on the will of a sovereign legislator to thepower of kings and judges and therefore to both government and legalprocedure led to questions about limits on that sovereign will. Theconstitutional order structured by the ordinary power always remainedvulnerable to the sovereigns absolute power, in much the same way thatCarl Schmitts identification of the sovereign as he who decides in thestate of exception hollows out claims to constitutional government.43

Although I will generally refer to the binome as a way of conceptualizingmonarchical power, one must remember that the distinction between thetwo powers sometimes signalled a constitutional position, namely, for oragainst the absolute power, and at other times denoted a certain type ofprocedure. A magistrate who declared that the kings transfer of casesfrom the Parlement to the Grand Conseil was extraordinary meantthat it was unconstitutional and contrary to the proper usage of royalpower and the proper processes of government. A magistrate who rec-ommended employing extraordinary procedure in a certain case used

41 Moritz-August von Bethmann-Hollweg, Der Civilproze des gemeinen Rechts ingeschichtlicher Entwicklung (Bonn: A. Marcus, 18641874), 6 vols.; Aubert, Histoire duParlement, t.II: La Procedure; Louis de Carbonnie`res, La procedure devant la chambrecriminelle du Parlement de Paris au XIVe sie`cle (Paris: H. Champion, 2004).

42 Oakley, The Absolute and Ordained Power of God and King in the Sixteenth andSeventeenth Centuries: Philosophy, Science, Politics, and Law, Journal of the Historyof Ideas 59, no. 4 (Oct. 1998), 669690.

43 Pennington, Prince and the Law, 38118; Ennio Cortese, Absolutisme et legalite dansle droit savant du Moyen Age: Les deux faces dune meme medaille, in M. Stolleisand J. Krynen (eds.), Science politique et droit public dans les facultes de droit europeennes(XIIIeXVIIIe sie`cle) (Frankfurt-am-Main:Max-Planck-Institut fur europaische Rechts-geschichte, 2008), 113124; Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Conceptof Sovereignty, tr. G. Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

The Ecclesiology of the Kingdom 15

a technical legal term for specific procedural forms. I focus on how thecontrast between the kings ordinary and extraordinary power structuredconstitutional debate. Although Francis I required the absolute power tomeet both the enormous costs of war, his and his sons ransoms, andthe indemnity he owed Charles V, he could not break the constitutionalcarapace of the Parlements constitutionally motivated obstructionismuntil the courts fear of heresy led it to accept in fact, to request the exceptional procedures and courts once condemned as abuses of thekings absolute power.Even though a monarch who had one officer for every 2,000 subjects

as did Francis I had less effective power than one who had one officer forevery 250 subjects as did Louis XIV, the consolidation of a practice ofjuridical absolutism under the former transformed the scope and natureof royal authority and laid the groundwork for developments under thelatter.44 What Arlette Jouanna has called a new style ofmonarchy priv-ileging the interiorisation and not the institutionalization of limits on theabsolute power paved the way for the administrative or fiscal absolutismof the seventeenth century by legitimizing the enormous growth in spend-ing and taxation that differentiated the reach of Richelieus state from thatof Francis I.45 In other words, Richelieu could spend nearly ten times asmuch annually as the result of forms of monarchical action legitimized inthe early sixteenth century. Francis Is new style of monarchy consistedin a new practice of royal authority that gave the king of France powerfunctionally equivalent to if not structurally identical to that gained morespectacularly and bloodily by other early sixteenth-century rulersincluding Henry VIII of England or the Protestant rulers of Scandinaviaand theHoly Roman Empire. For this reason, the emergence of a practiceof royal absolutism may be considered the first, political, and success-ful French Reformation. In France, the political reformation of Churchand State and the religious which is to say theological reformationwere more clearly demarcated than in, for example, Norway, where theredefinition of the polity and its religious life coincided.46 In France, a

44 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Ancien Regime: A History of France, 16101774, tr.Mark Greengrass (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 2.

45 Arlette Jouanna, La France du seizie`me sie`cle, 14831598 (Paris: Presses universitairesde France, 1996), 169. Under Francis I, the monarchy spent between 6 and 7 millionlivres tournois (lt) per year (approximately 110 tons of silver) on average, as opposed to20 million (242 tons) in 1600 and 235 million (1,194 tons) in 1636: Francoise Bayard,preface to Philippe Hamon, Largent du roi: Les finances sous Francois Ier (Paris: Comitepour lhistoire economique et financie`re de la France, 1994), xii.

46 K. E. Christofferson, Lady Inger and Her Family: Norways Exemplar of MixedMotives in the Reformation, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 55(1986), 2138.

16 Introduction

political reformation precluded a religious reformation. By deploying thecause of church reform in the century after 1430, the king of France andhis administration justified the creation of a territorially comprehensivesovereign authority. By roughly 1530, the king could tax the clergy, hearappeals from church courts, appoint to all major benefices within thekingdom, and freely use his absolute power as simply another modalityof royal authority. One could say that the triumph of juridical absolutismrestored the discourse of absolute and ordinary power to its original, the-ological sense. Rather than referring to two reified powers, one of whichwas denied to earthly monarchs, the terms absolute and ordinarypower thereafter denoted different aspects or modalities of the kings sin-gle power: like God, the sixteenth-century absolute monarch ordinarilyabided by his own laws but could, if he so willed, derogate from thoselaws through what amounted to judicial miracles.47 Absolute monarchywas the result of the pursuit of church reform in France from roughly1440 to 1540, between the issue of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourgesin 1438 and the abolition of any remaining privileges to elect to abbaciesand bishoprics in 1531.As earlier noted, secular monarchies did not and could not adopt the

practices of papal monarchy in a simple, uncomplicated fashion, becausethere was no consensus on the proper shape of papal monarchy. Indeed,contestation over the shape of the papal monarchy wasmost intense in thefifteenth century. Nor did only one form of monarchy emerge from theperiod. The French monarchy preserved obedience to Rome, if attenu-ated, a sacral priesthood, and ecclesiastical courts while securing informalsupremacy over the French church. The English monarchy broke withRome and secured formal supremacy over the English church at the priceof a momentous if not immediately evident redefinition of parliamen-tary competence and an equally momentous transformation of religioussensibility.48 German princes broke with Rome and with any concept of

47 On the principal judicial miracle, Sarah Hanley, The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France:Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (Princeton, New Jersey: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1983);MackHolt, The King in Parlement: The Problem of the Lit deJustice in Sixteenth-Century France,TheHistorical Journal 31, no. 3 (Sept. 1988), 507523); Elizabeth Brown and Richard Famiglietti, The Lit de Justice: Semantics, Ceremonial,and the Parlement of Paris (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1994); Robert Knecht, FrancisI and the Lit de Justice: A Legend Defended, French History 7, no. 1 (1993), 5383;Sylvie Daubresse, Henri III au parlement de Paris: contribution a` lhistoire des litsde justice, Bibliothe`que de lEcole des Chartes 159 (2001), 579607. On the parallel ofGods miracles and states of exception, see Schmitt, Political Theology, 36.

48 Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England,14501642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 130172; Ethan Shagan,Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2003).

The Ecclesiology of the Kingdom 17

a sacramental priesthood, more completely subsuming the church intothe republic than possible in either England or France at the price of everunifying Germany in the manner of other Western European polities.49

Gallicanism was less a potentially universal cast of mind than the technol-ogy that permitted France to participate in the European Reformationsin a uniquely French manner. Although the theological Reformationfailed in that France did not adopt the Reformed faith, the nativetradition of Gallican reform, operating within an originally ecclesiologi-cal constitutional discourse, facilitated a successful political reformationessentially completed at the very beginning of the religious Reformation and on account of it, as I show. This first French Reformation has beenunderappreciated by historians because of lingering presumptions that asuccessful Reformation was necessarily Protestant and necessarily reli-gious. The former notion has been progressively undermined at leastsince John Bossy redefined the Reformation as a panEuropean transfor-mation of Christian practice between 1400 and 1700.50

Scholars have reevaluated the medieval background to the Reforma-tion as a political and a religious phenomenon, recovering its contextin late medieval ecclesiopolitics. Tom Brady has proposed that the suc-cessful reform of the Holy Roman Empires governing structures in the1490s prevented effective reform of the Imperial Church by crystallizingthe mixing of religious and secular authority embodied by the eccle-siastical princes in the Empires constitution. The political foundationfor the survival of the Protestant Reformation emerged from the colli-sion of German princes seeking to craft cohesive territorial principalitiesautonomous from imperial authority with religious hopes that could notbe satisfied by the politicized Imperial Church.51 In the Empire, success-ful political reform precluded religious reform except by rupture withthe Catholic Church. In France, however, the currents of reform evidentacross fifteenth-century Europe encouraged the creation of a cohesive ter-ritorial monarchy and the reshaping of ChurchState relations. As notedearlier, traditional historiography has difficulty accounting for resistanceto the monarchy in the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century,particularly in the Parlement and University of Paris. This is because thetriumph of absolutism is assumed to be a necessary step on the path to themodern, one, and indivisible French Republic. Although the self-interestof the kings subjects certainly played a role in Frances constitutional

49 Thomas A. Brady, Jr., German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 14001650 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

50 John Bossy,Christianity in theWest, 14001700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).51 Brady, German Histories.

18 Introduction

fortunes, one must also allow for some minimal idealism, if only indefense of the Parlements institutional authority. Acknowledging theimportance of politico-religious ideals in quotidian constitutional devel-opment reveals that there is a more interesting, more panEuropean storyhere and one, I think, that better accounts for the complexity of humanmotives. The transition from late medieval France, in which the concil-iarist Parlement of Paris attempted to hold the monarchy to legal normsit had defined, to early modern France, in which the monarchy increas-ingly made good on its absolutist claims, can be explained in terms otherthan those of self-interest: the passage from conciliarism to absolutismoperated smoothly along the axis of church reform.Ernst Kantorowiczs famous study of medieval and early modern

monarchy undervalues its properly religious dimension, perhaps under-standably given the juridical and intellectual focus of The Kings TwoBodies. The fifteenth century was the great age of reform. The conciliarmovement was inseparable from its call for reform in head andmembersof the Church, the papacy claimed that conciliarism prevented reform,and princes invoked reform to justify their encroachments on ecclesiasti-cal justice, appointments, and taxation. The impetus toward reform tooka new direction in the 1520s, when Protestant heresy appeared in France.Up to this point, the Parlement of Paris had hewed to its conciliarist con-stitutionalism, defending both religious orthodoxy and the constitutionalorder in Church and State. It upheld the authority of judges ordinary, thatis, of bishops within the Church and of the magistrates of the parlementswithin the State, against the papal and royal encroachment manifestedby inquisitors, legates, and extraordinary judicial commissions. With theemergence of Protestant heresy, the courts zeal to preserve orthodoxysubverted its constitutional position. To strip jurisdiction over cases ofheresy from bishops deemed negligent and lax, the Parlement turnedfirst to the popes absolute power and eventually to the kings, aban-doning its defense of the authority of bishops against that of the popeand the king. If, until 1525 or so, the Parlement of Pariss conciliaristconstitutionalism expanded royal authority and simultaneously hedgedit in with elements of conciliarist theories of papal monarchy, the appear-ance of heresy freed the discourse of reform from conciliarist limitations.The threat of heresy to a polity that imagined itself in ecclesial termsaccomplished the smooth transition from late medieval to early modernconstitutionalism, from conciliarism to absolutism.52

52 My narrative aligns with the chronology of William Monter, Judging the French Refor-mation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1999).

The Fifteenth Century and the Old Regime 19

The Fifteenth Century and the Old Regime

In terms of Western European history, it may be exaggerated but notentirely unreasonable to describe the fifteenth century as a historiograph-ical black hole that annihilates historical data in an interpretive vacuum.What to make of the Conciliar Movement, the Hussite Revolt, the Hun-dred Years War, the rise and fall of Burgundy, the series of mid-centuryconcordats between the papacy and European monarchs, the reconquestof Granada, the discovery of America, the economic and demographicrecovery from the fourteenth-century crisis, artistic and cultural innova-tion, or the creative intensification of state fiscality and jurisdiction? Withthe collapse of the grand narrative of modern Western history beginningin the Renaissance, the fifteenth century is no longer easily identified asthe birth of the modern world, a concept more frequently challengedthan defined.53 With the decline of the Renaissance and the Reforma-tion as fields of hiring in history departments, the fifteenth century fallsbetween the Middle Ages and the early modern period, belonging to nei-ther. The period concerns topics too modern for medieval historians atthe same time as its study requires medieval research skills that manyearly modern historians lack. To a medievalist, the centurys expand-ing bureaucracies offer a wealth of unedited and undigitized sources. Toan early modernist, the sources seem thin and of a notably medieval,manuscript, and lacunary nature. To study the period, one must answerearly modern questions with medieval sources.54 Although postmodernand postcolonial challenges to the concept of modernity have under-mined the centurys secure identity as the birth of the modern world,the emergence of nascent national churches and national outlooks makesthe century difficult to assimilate to the Middle Ages, generally viewedaccording to the framework of a Europe-wide Christian civilization. Con-versely, the persistence of universalist concerns, most importantly forthis study that of reform, makes it difficult to tie the century to the earlymodern period, especially because recent scholarship has depicted the

53 William Bouwsma, The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History, The Ameri-can Historical Review 84, no. 1 (Feb. 1979), 115.

54 For instance, the trends described by Sarah Hanley in The Jurisprudence of the Arrets:Marital Union, Civil Society, and State Formation in France, 15501650, Law andHistory Review 21, no. 1 (Spring, 2003), 140, as originating in the 1530s could havebeen identified earlier had the author broadened her investigation from printed collec-tions of arrets to manuscript collections of notabilia or the Parlements registers: TylerLange, The Birth of a Maxim: A Bishop Has No Territory, Speculum 89, no. 1 (Jan.2014), 128147.

20 Introduction

Reformation as medieval in intent, if modern in effect.55 When exam-ined looking forward, the fifteenth century is Johan Huizingas centuryof decline and staleness, of the extravagant cultural excrescences of thedying Middle Ages nevertheless pregnant with impending rebirth orRenaissance. It is also Steven Ozments age of reform preparing for theReformation.56 When examined looking backward, the fifteenth centuryis Jacob Burckhardts, the period in which the modern State and modernman were born in Italy, and Alfred Pollards, in which New Monar-chies released (proto-)national states from the tutelage of their gov-erness, the Church.57 My fifteenth century looks unashamedly forward,connecting medieval aspects of the century including the obsessionwith reform to modern developments such as national churches orterritorial principalities. I appreciate in this context Heiko Obermansmemorable play on Huizingas image of the autumn or harvest-tide(herfstij) of the Middle Ages in hisHarvest of Medieval Theology because itcaptures the transitional nature of the period without dwelling unduly onits deadness.58 In the same way that Oberman redescribed the sterilityof fifteenth-century theology as ripeness, I would prefer to reevaluatewhat Paul Ourliac called the emptiness of fifteenth-century canonicalthought.59 In tribute to Oberman and to Ourliac, I might justly havesubtitled this book The Harvest of Medieval Ecclesiology.Medieval theories of the Church, most finely developed in response to

theGreatWestern Schism, were richest and ripest in the fifteenth century.However, the subsequent history of ecclesiology tends almost inevitablytoward a narrative of decline, as in Francis Oakleys elegant history of theprogress of an increasingly univocal, Roman, papalist, and centralizedmodel of the Church.60 However, if postReformation ecclesiology is a

55 Heiko Oberman progressively unveiled the medieval Luther in The Harvest of MedievalTheology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1963) and Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (New Haven, Connecticut:Yale University Press, 1989).

56 Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, tr. Rodney Payton and Ulrich Mam-mitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Steven Ozment, The Age ofReform (12501550): An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reforma-tion Europe (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1980).

57 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, tr. S. G. C. Middlemore(New York: Penguin Books, 1990); A. F. Pollard, Factors in Modern History (New York:G. P. Putnams Sons, 1907), esp. 5356.

58 The image offers the enticing possibility of describing the seventeenth century as ahistorical winter. The translators discuss the title in the preface to the cited edition ofHuizinga, Autumn, ixxviii.

59 Ourliac, Les sources du droit canonique au XVe sie`cle: le solstice de 1440, in Etudes,361374, 361.

60 Oakley, Conciliarist Tradition.

The Fifteenth Century and the Old Regime 21

field of stubble, sixteenth-century political theory constitutes the abun-dant and varied harvest therefrom. To shift metaphors and to apply theconviction of Ourliac, James Burns, and Patrick Arabeyre that ecclesiol-ogy was the fifteenth centurys form of political thought, fifteenth-centuryecclesiology found its expression not in its legitimate child, early modernecclesiology, which lacked its parents diversity and sophistication, but inits bastard child, sixteenth-century constitutional thought. The depth ofsixteenth-century political and constitutional thought suggests that intel-lectual energy was transferred not only from the form of the Church tothe faith itself but from the form of the Church to the form of the State.61

In exaggerated, simplistic terms, the earlymodern State was the harvestof the late medieval Church. Narratives of secularization, which mislead-ingly implies dechristianization, or laicization, which better encompassesthe Protestant priesthood of all believers and the Catholic incorporationof the clergy more closely into the secular polity, or sacralization, whichbetter fits Catholics than Protestants, who saw the polity less as Christsbody, or the de-differentiation62 of Church and State in the Reforma-tion period are consequently ways of describing the same process, one inwhich European territorial polities organized themselves during the ageof Reformations with the aid of concepts and administrative techniquesborrowed from the Church. The transformation is best characterized asan unintended consequence of the Christian hope to remake the world.It may be that the fifteenth-century expression of the perennial desirefor reform provided the motor of transition between the Middle Agesand the Modern World,63 a transition in which outcomes across Europevaried according to local political, religious, economic, and social config-urations. The results of reform consequently looked different in France,in the Spains, in the Papal States, in the Germanies, in England, orin Scandinavia. Although my story is national, it is one variant of apanEuropean story of the reconfiguration of the relation between theindividual Christian subject, the ruler, and God at the end of the MiddleAges.This examination of how the late medieval impetus to reform con-

nects medieval conciliarism to early modern absolutism centers on theprogressive nature of an inherently backward-looking concept. In thisperiod, reform was directed not at innovation but at the reparation of

61 Ourliac, Sources de droit canonique, 374.62 Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the Modern State in

Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).63 One suggestion: Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolu-

tion Secularized Society (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2012).

22 Introduction

the deformation introduced through human vices.64 It was aimed atrecovering the primitive purity of the apostolic Church, of the rule ofSaint Benedict, of the form of the French monarchy, of the mores of thelaity and clergy, or of any other institution or collectivity by abolishingdeformations. Reform (reformatio) was an attempt to recover a norma-tive original state, not progress toward an ideal future. True reformationor restoration to the pristine shape (forma) of all things would only comeat the end of history, at the Last Judgment. Reform was therefore a poly-valent concept, a universal motif invoked in different circumstances bydifferent historical actors for different, often divergent ends. The causejustified both election to major benefices and papal or royal provision tothose same bishoprics and abbacies. In the fifteenth century, the failureof conciliar reform of the universal Church in head and in members,that is, both at the papal curia and among the laity across Christen-dom, led PreReformation French reformers to reduce their aims to theFrench or Gallican church. This reduction of geographic scope providesa bridge between the universalist Middle Ages and the particularist earlymodern age. My subjects, zealous for reform but perceiving corruptioneverywhere else in the universal Church, limited themselves to the reformof the Church within a particular political circumscription, placing theChurch firmly if probably not wholly intentionally within the Republic.65

In the words of Jean-Marie Le Gall, the theologians affirmation of [thekings] duty to reform complemented the jurists affirmation of a rightto reform. This ius reformandi aided the affirmation of the State, as themonarchy became sacralized rather than becoming laicized or spirituallyneutral. . . . The absorption of competence in religious matters sacralizedpower.66 At the end of the fifteenth century, church reform defined whatit meant to be a sovereign.Here we find the conceptual origins of that modern French state

modern in the French sense as the period from roughly 1500 to 1800preceding the contemporary period. Historians often either assumethe states existence, tracing the accumulation of institutions from Clovisonward, or displace the emergence of a modern, bureaucratic, admin-istrative monarchy to the Old Regimes last century. I identify the originsof modern France in the adoption of ecclesial modes of organization bythe New Monarchy rebuilding and expanding its authority at the end

64 Philippe Contamine, Le vocabulaire politique en France a` la fin duMoyen Age: Lideede reformation, in Etat et Eglise dans la Gene`se de lEtat moderne (Madrid: Casa deVelazquez, 1986), 145156; Le Gall, Moines au temps des reformes.

65 Jotham Parsons, The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renais-sance France (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 8.

66 Le Gall, Moines au temps des reformes, 130.

The Fifteenth Century and the Old Regime 23

of the Hundred Years War. This may be less shocking after consideringrecent French debates over lacite, over religion as a legal category withinan ostensibly lay state.67 When Charles VII and his successors sought torefound political culture on something more secure than personal alle-giance to the kings person, they naturally drew on the periods mostdeveloped government, the Church. They drew not just administrativemethods from the Church but a template for a new political society. Thelate medieval Church, organized in terms of a jurisdictional hierarchy inwhich the believer was assimilated to a legal subject whose assent to thedoctrine of the faith was assumed, offered French monarchs and theirservants a potent model for the cultural underpinnings of the politicalcommunity.68 The adoption of an ecclesial model of political organiza-tion facilitated the redescription of royal authority as divine, absolute,natural, and inescapable and the extension of the kings sovereign jus-tice and authority to tax over all subjects, magnate and serf, lay and(insofar as possible) clerical. It sacralized the kings duties by embeddingdemands for reform and for the defense of orthodoxy within the concep-tual foundations of the monarchy. These aspects were not peripheral, notconsequences of existence in an Age of Faith or Age of Reformationsbut intrinsic to the nature of the polity as it emerged from the MiddleAges.The Old Regime monarchy was born of the adoption of ecclesial

modes of organization and the use of the pretext of reform to expandroyal authority at the end of the Middle Ages. In this sense, the second,Protestant Reformation only accelerated and intensified a movement evi-dent since the early fifteenth century. Rather than treating the Wars ofReligion as the period of chaos prior to the emergence of real abso-lutism with Henry IV, Louis XIII and Richelieu, or Louis XIV, the latersixteenth-century civil and religious wars manifested the vulnerabilityconsequent on the absolute monarchys basis in orthodoxy. Absolutism nascent under Charles VII, evident under Louis XI, latent under Charles

67 Philippe Sturmel, La Pragmatique Sanction de Bourges (1438) a` lorigine de la lacitefrancaise? Contribution a` lhistoire du gallicanisme,Annuaire Droit et Religions 3 (2008),227275; Frederic Gabriel, Le droit en son histoire: jus commune, theologie de latradition et localite dans la France classique, Revue dhistoire des facultes de droit et de lascience juridique 28 (2008), 279-308; Alain Supiot, Homo juridicus: Essair sur la fonctionanthropologique du droit (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2005), and Ontologies of Law, NewLeft Review 13 (Jan.Feb. 2002), 107124.

68 Laurent Mayali, Duo erunt in carne una and the Medieval Canonists, in Iuris His-toria: Liber Amicorum Gero Dolezalek (Berkeley, California: Robbins Collection, 2008),161175, esp. 165; Frederic Gabriel, Qualifications de la communaute et autoritede la Tradition: lhistoire des dogmes comme construction ecclesiale, de Torquemada a`Lethmaet (XVeXVIe sie`cle).Bulletin du centre detudes medievales dAuxerre, Hors-serien7 (2013): http://cem.revues.org/12901.

24 Introduction

VIII and Louis XII, crystallized under Francis I survived the Wars ofReligion shaken but intact.69 The practices of Sully, Richelieu, Mazarin,or Louis XIV reflect an intensification of existing modes of absolutismmore than any great innovation. The contours of the Old Regime monar-chy were set early in the sixteenth century in the first French Reforma-tion: the notion of two modalities of royal power, the kings defence oforthodoxy, and the embodiment of the polity in his human body. Thisis not a book about the French Revolution, nor about the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century monarchy, nor about the emergence of FrenchProtestantism but one about the origins of the intellectual and politicalframework of the Catholic, absolute monarchy of the Old Regime.The king of France and the Parlement of Paris harnessed late medieval

church reform to construct the juridically absolute early modern Frenchmonarchy. Enforcing and defending reform within France, they createda practice of comprehensive royal sovereignty that overrode practicaldistinctions between royal, secular justice and ecclesiastical justice andtheoretical distinctions between the monarchs ordinary and absolutepowers. By the time of the Protestant Reformation, the king of Francewas effectively sovereign over clergy and laity alike, over the kingdomof France and the Gallican church. Through the Parlements responseto Protestant heresy in the 1520s, the term absolute power came todenote not unconstitutional forms of royal action but one modality of thekings unitary power, transforming first the practice and then the theoryof monarchy. The script of reform embedded in canonical theories andprocedures of monarchy, when reduced from the universal Church tothe kingdom of France by the kings magistrates, precluded a successfulProtestant Reformation and created the basis for later intensification ofabsolutist governance. Between roughly 1440 and 1540, through changesthat amounted to the First French Reformation, a constitutionalist move-ment within the Church produced absolutism in France.

69 Jotham Parsons, Money and Sovereignty in Early Modern France, Journal of theHistory of Ideas 62, no. 1 (Jan. 2001), 5979; Mark Greengrass, Pieces of the Jigsaw:Making Sense of French Taxation under the Last Valois, 157489, in W. M. Ormrod,M. Bonney, and R. Bonney (eds.), Crises, Revolutions, and Self-Sustained Growth: Essaysin European Fiscal History, 11301830 (Stamford, UK: Shaun Tyas, 1999) 138169.

1 Law and Political Culture in LateMedieval France

The subdisciplinary boundaries of historical study define narratives of therise of the absolute monarchy. Political accounts emphasize Francis IsItalian ambitions, social accounts actors concerns to preserve and to aug-ment patrimonies, legal accounts the impact of humanist jurisprudenceor other internal forces, and religious accounts the tenor of religious life.Since Natalie Davis shattered the historiography of the French Reforma-tion into regional studies not quite half a century ago, there have been fewoverarching narratives connecting the French Reformation to the birthof the Old Regime.1 To weave a narrative joining religious sensibilities,political culture, and judicial practice, I examine the legal basis and reli-gious aspects of early modern political culture in France, for it was law,the law that mediated between the will of a creator God and the MostChristian Kings subjects, that formed the basis of early modern politicalculture. This political culture, by structuring French society, connectsmaterial and intellectual causes of the rise of absolutism. It was not onlythe greed or fear of French elites or the spread of humanist pedagogy butthe desire for church reform that impelled the emergence of absolutistforms of government under Francis I.Early modern French society was conceived in a juridical mode, in

terms of legal rights and jurisdictional hierarchies deriving from Godsplan for the universe. Medieval categories of social identity had beenthose of ones function within Gods plan, structured through oppo-sitions clerical/lay, monk/priest, man/woman, noble/commoner, mer-chant/peasant within a framework of clerical oratores praying for all,noble bellatores fighting for all, and peasant laboratores feeding all. Theconstitutional transformation I describe was not limited to the prac-tices of the sovereign courts or the royal administration, for their actions

1 Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, California:Stanford University Press, 1975). One notes the absence of anything on the church fromDavid Potter (ed.), France in the Later Middle Ages, Oxford Short History of France(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

25

26 Law and Political Culture in Late Medieval France

recentered society around the monarch in a profound way. Married cler-ics, noble bureaucrats, and rich commoners still muddied the boundariesof the three estates, but their identities depended henceforth on the kingwho guaranteed each orders privileges and to whom each order renderedparticular services. It was not that God would not judge at the end ofTime, rather that the immediate needs of the monarchical polity cameto be identified with criteria upon which God would judge. In time, thisproduced the momentous transition Michel de Certeau discerned in theseventeenth century, when the organizing categories of society ceasedto be religious and became those of the State.2 The novel distinctionbetween sword nobles and robe nobles, each dependent on the monar-chy for recognition of its status, the passage from a civic identity to aroyal identity among Frances urban elites, and the firm placement of theChurch within the Republic are forerunners of that change.3 This is notto assert simplistically that all of my actors were uniformly, consistentlypious men and women some may have been such superhuman speci-mens, although far from most but that the conceptual universe throughwhich they made sense of the material world was fundamentally religious.Nearly every aspect of life could take on a religious coloring. In a world inwhich we cannot doubt that the vast majority of men and women desiredeternal life, their ideas and their actions, if not always explicitly directedat this end, could always be interpreted with a view to the Last Judg-ment. For this reason, I discuss the place of law in Gods plan and theintellectual and material basis of the relation between canonical politicalthought and constitutional practice in late medieval France.

2 Michel de Certeau, The Inversion of What Can Be Thought: Religious History inthe Seventeenth Century and The Formality of Practices: From Religious Systemsto the Ethics of the Enlightenment (The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries), inThe Writing of History, tr. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988),125146, 147205, and The Possession at Loudun, tr. Michael Smith (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2000).

3 On nobles, Robert Descimon, Nobles de lignage et noblesse de service. Sociogene`sescomparees de lepee et de la robe (XVeXVIIIe sie`cle), in R. Descimon and ElieHaddad (eds.), Epreuves de noblesse: Les experiences nobiliaires de la haute robe parisienne(XVIeXVIIIe sie`cle) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010), 277302; Edouard Perroy, SocialMobility among the French Noblesse in the Later Middle Ages, Past and Present 21, no.1 (1962), 2538. On civic culture, Penny Roberts, A City in Conflict: Troyes during theFrench Wars of Religion (Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press,1996); Mark Konnert, Civic Agendas and Religious Passion: Chalons-sur-Marne duringthe French Wars of Religion, 15601594 (Kirksville, Missouri: Sixteenth Century JournalPress, 1997); Hilary Bernstein, Between Crown and Community: Politics and Civic Culturein Sixteenth-Century Poitiers (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004); SaraBeam, Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (Ithaca, New York:Cornell University Press, 2007). On the Church in the State, Parsons, Church in theRepublic, though one longs for the sixteenth-century version of JohnMcManners, Churchand Society in Eighteenth-Century France, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Political Culture 27

Political Culture

The concept of political culture enabled Keith Baker and Lynn Hunt tobypass purely intellectual and purely social explanations of the FrenchRevolution.4 Their work examines the moment when a political culturebased on democratic participation reflecting the Nations sovereigntysuperseded a political culture based on the sovereign kings place asguarantor of the different privileges that constituted Old Regime society.At the other end of the Old Regime, Geoffrey Koziol has described a verydifferent political culture. In seeking to explain the cohesion of Francein the Central Middle Ages under the early Capetian kings, Koziol con-cludes that princes who showed scant reverence for the kings person nev-ertheless intended to use the idea of royal authority to legitimate [their]own authority over their own subjects.5 The concept of just rulershiprequired a king, whom magnates counseled and imitated. There was nosovereignty. Public power was parcelized, dispersed, and privatized.Lordship combined economic and judicial power, the neat distinctionbetween lordship with public power (seigneurie banale) and lordship withonly economic rights (seigneurie foncie`re) being a historians creation basedon distinctions that emerged as corollaries of the transformation that isthe subject of this study.6 High medieval political culture was based onthe mimesis of kingship, not on effective royal action.The period between the Central Middle Ages and the French Revo-

lution, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, was marked by acharacteristically juridical political culture based on the kings inimitablesovereignty. This extensive period includes two transitional periods, aninitial one during which the fourteenth-century economic depression,the Hundred Years War, and a relatively limited view of monarchicalpower retarded the progress of the kings sovereignty, and a final one dur-ing which the ideological underpinnings of Old Regime political