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This article is in part an intervention in the ongoing debate inaugurated by Peter Harrison in 2002 when he called into question the validity of what had come by then to be called ‘the voluntarism ...

Over the course of the past half-century and in the wake of the first articles published on the matter by Edgar Zilsel, Joseph Needham, and myself, historians of science have come to focus with growing insistence on the rise to prominence among the seventeenthw-century mechanical philosophers of the concept of (physical) laws of nature and on the significant role it played in the emergence of early-modern science. Revisiting the case I made on that matter in 1961, this paper goes on to engage in dialogue with the related but divergent argument John Henry framed in the course of his “Metaphysics and the Origins of Modern Science,” an article that appeared in in the pages of Early Science and Medicine in the year 2004.

This paper is an intervention in the debate inaugurated by Peter Harrison in 2002 when he called into question the validity of what has come to be called ‘the voluntarism and early-modern science thesis’. Though it subsequently drew support from such historians of science as J. E. McGuire, Margaret Osler, and Betty-Joe Teeter Dobbs, the origins of the thesis are usually traced back to articles published in 1934 and 1961 respectively by the philosopher Michael Foster and the historian of ideas Francis Oakley. Central to Harrison’s critique of the thesis are claims he made about the meaning of the scholastic distinction between the potentia dei absoluta et ordinata and the role it played in the thinking of early-modern theologians and natural philosophers. This paper calls directly into question the accuracy of Harrison’s claims on that very matter.

Setting his face firmly against William Manchester's egregious dismissal of the Middle Ages as little more than “a melange of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myth...

Via the focus on food that she had found to be the distinguishing preoccupation in the female piety of the Middle Ages and had addressed so probingly and with such independence of scholarly spirit in her Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Caroline Walker Bynum has moved on over the past two decades, and logically enough, to bring her formidable scholarly intelligence and drive to bear, first, on issues pertaining to the body and then, beyond that, to the intriguing cat's cradle of questions pertaining to late-medieval assumptions about matter and its nature in general. The first impulse came to fruition in her Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, a book in which celibacy, asceticism, fasting, and renunciation notwithstanding, she pushed back hard against the modern temptation to project onto medieval religiosity some sort of body-hating soul-body dualism. In this she was moved, as she herself has forthrightly acknowledged, by a “determination to let individual voices be individual and to let the past be different,” as well as by the adamant refusal, evinced also in the work under review, to simplify “the intricate and contradictory assumptions and practices” she was exploring. “Paradox remains paradox,” she has bluntly insisted, and “complexity remains complex” (13).

Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation. By Brian Patrick McGuire. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005. Pp. xviii, 446. $85.00 clothbound; $30.00 paperback.) More than forty years ago now, in the distinguished two-volume tome on the later medieval church contributed to Fliche and Martin, Histoire de l'Eglise, F. Delaruelle chose to devote a whole chapter to Jean Gerson (1363-1429), long-serving Chancelor of the University of Paris, dedicated pastor, gifted preacher, tireless advocate of church reform "in head and members," distinguished theologian, and one of the leading intellectuals of his day. In so doing, and speaking of the first half of the fifteenth century, Delaruelle felt it warranted to portray the great Chancellor as "the mirror of his times" and to entitle the chapter "Le siecle de Gerson." By the time he did so, scholarly interest in matters Gersonian had long since begun to quicken.That that was the case is evidenced inter alia by the decision of Palemon Glorieux to undertake the first new edition of Gerson's complete works since that of Dupin in 1706, by Max lieberman's extraordinary (and extraordinarily gritty) series of articles on his life and writings, and by the work of Louis Mourin on his sermons, Andre Combes on his mystical theology, and J. B. Morrall on his ecclesiology. In the years since then interest in one or other aspect of Gerson's richly varied career has, if anything, intensified. It is reflected, for example, in Gilbert Ouy's fundamental researches on the Gersonian manuscript tradition, in the works of G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes on his ecclesiology, Louis B. Pascoe on his idea of reform, D. Catherine Brown on his pastoral theology, in Brian Patrick McGuire's translation into English of a whole series of his early writings as well as in his sponsorship and editing of a multi-authored Companion to Jean Gerson scheduled by Brill for publication in 2006. All of that duly noted, the surprising thing about the currently thriving field of Gersonian studies is the fact that nobody since John Connolly in 1929 has made a full-scale attempt at a new biographical treatment of the man himself. That prominent gap in Gersoniana McGuire himself has now moved boldly to fill. He has done so in this substantial, painstakingly-researched, carefully-balanced, and finely-nuanced study, clearly the outcome of long years of sustained effort. Unlike ConnoEy, who organized his somewhat anachronistically defensive biography in thematic fashion, McGuire has gone about his task in straightforward chronological fashion, conducive to the charting of a lifetime's maturation and development on the part of his subject, basing himself on an attentive reading of the full corpus of Gerson's writings, French as well as Latin, and quite self-consciously eschewing "any fashionable theoretical approach" (p. xi). In 1964, noting the sheer volume of Gerson's writing and the self-revelatory nature of much of it, Delaruelle expressed surprise that his complex psychological make-up had not been made the object of any really probing scholarly study. In his own non-theoretical way, McGuire may be said to have remedied that lack. In the course of his book he dwells, often at length, on most of the salient features of Gerson's public career, from his early and surprisingly unrestrained attack on the teaching of the Dominican theologian Juan de Monzon concerning the Immaculate Conception, down to the passionate but ultimately unsuccessful campaign he pursued at the Council of Constance (and in the teeth of Burgundian opposition) to secure a full-blown condemnation of Jean Petit's attempt to vindicate the legitimacy of tyrannicide.Thus he focuses, in the years intervening, on Gerson's unsuccessful attempt as dean to reform the chapter of the collegiate church of Saint Donatien at Bruges, on his leadership of the Parisian faculty of theology in its opposition to the attempt (1409) of the Franciscan Jean Gorel to vindicate the alleged pastoral prerogatives of the mendicant orders, on his ongoing effort via sermon and tract to forward on a broader front the reform of the universal Church in head and members, and on the slow maturation of his position vis-a-vis the deepening scandal of the Great Schism, his eventual embrace of the via concilii, his passionate advocacy before and during the Council of Constance (1414-18) of the conciliarist claim that general councils, acting without a pope, were under certain circumstances superior in jurisdiction to the pope and possessed the power to judge, condemn, and, if need be, depose a recalcitrant pontiff. …

Francis Oakley continues his magisterial three-part history of the emergence of Western political thought during the Middle Ages with this second volume in the series. Here, Oakley explores kingship from the tenth century to the beginning of the fourteenth, showing how, under the stresses of religious and cultural development, kingship became an inceasingly secular institution. "A masterpiece and the central part of a trilogy that will be a true masterwork."-Jeffrey Burton Russell, University of California, Santa Barbara

The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law, 1150-1625. By Brian Tierney. [Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, No. 5.] (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press. 1997. Pp. xi, 380. $24.95 paperback.) It is given to few scholars to produce truly path-breaking books and to still fewer to produce more than one of them. Tierney's Foundations of the Conciliar Theory and his Origins of Papal Infallibility both qualify for that coveted designation, and the book under review surely comes close to so doing. Unlike the other two books it does not claim to offer a fully integrated account of its subject. Its subtitle suggests, indeed, that it may be no more than a collection of studies. But it is, in fact, a good deal more than that. If some of its chapters were originally published as separate articles and others at first conceived of in the same way, all have been so revised as to minimize repetition and embedded in new material that sets them in an overarching context; it explores related topics and provides the sort of connective tissue needed to make clear that these several studies are united and propelled forward by a powerful and sustained argument. The topics covered range far and wide and treat of a truly impressive range of issues, from the canonist origins of natural right discourse in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries via Henry of Ghent and the claims made for the "revolution" Ockham has been alleged to have made in the development of individual rights theory, on into an extended probing of the legal and political theorizing stimulated in Ockham and others by the great fourteenth-century dispute over Franciscan poverty, and thence to chapters devoted in turn to Gerson, Almain, Mair, and Summenhart, to Vitoria and Las Casas on the question of the rights of the American Indians, to Vitoria and Suarez on questions of rights, community, and sovereignty, and finally to Hugo Grotius, the great Dutch scholar whose genius it was to have been able to link together in his thinking the seemingly alien worlds of medieval and modern natural rights thinking. Disparate though these topics may seem to be, they are connected, with all the clarity and force one has come to expect of Tierney, by a series of firm rejections and equally firm affirmations. Rejected is the assumption that the theory of natural, individual, human rights was an invention of the early-modern era, that it was "as modern as the internal combustion engine" (thus Kenneth Minogue). …

Introduction 1. For Louis B. Pascoe, S.J., Joseph F. O'Callaghan 2. The Influence of Gerhart Ladner's The Idea of Reform, Phillip H. Stump 3. Pope Urban II, a Pseudo-Council of Chartres, and Congregato (C.16, q.7, c.2 "palea"). A Critical Edition, Robert Somerville 4. Reformation of the Intellect in the Thought of Aelred of Rievaulx, Daniel Marcel La Corte 5. Franciscan Poverty as a Basis for the Reform of the Church in Ubertino da Casale's Arbor vitae crucifixae Jesu, Gregory S. Beirich 6. Miles spiritus sancti: The Apocalyptic Dimension of Cola di Rienzo's Reform Ideology, Thomas C. Giangreco 7. Reforming Life by Conforming it to the Life of Christ: Pseudo-Bonaventure's Meditaciones vite Christi, Lawrence F. Hundersmarck 8. Gerson and the Celestines. A Critical Edition, Gilbert Ouy 9. The Rhetoric of Reform: Nicolas de Clamanges' Images of the End, Christopher M. Bellitto 10. Peter of Candia at Padua and Venice in March 1406. A Critical Edition, Thomas E. Morrissey 11. Reform and Obedience in Four Conciliar Sermons by Leonardo Dati, O.P., Thomas M. Izbicki 12. Annates and Reform at the Council of Basel, Gerald Christianson 13. The German Church Shortly before the Reformation: Nicolaus Cusanus and the Veneration of the Bleeding Hosts at Wilsnack, Morimichi Watanabe 14. Conciliarism in England: St. German, Starkey and the Marsiglian Myth, Francis Oakley 15. The Consilium de emendanda ecclesia and the 1555 Reform Bull of Pope Julius III: Dead Letters or Building Blocks?, William V. Hudon Indices Index of Persons Index of Places Index of Subjects

This book consists of some thirteen essays by an international group of scholars (Belgian, French, Dutch, English, and American) in which “the relationship between discourse, power, and history is ...

FRANcis OAKLEY* You Papists, though your brawles be endlesse one with another, Canonists against Schoole-men; Franciscans against Dominicks; Nominals against Reals; Thomas against Lumbard; Scotus against Thomas; Occam against Scotus;Alliacensis against Occam; Peter Scot against Catharine; Catharine against Caietan; Caietan against Pighius; Jesuites against Priests, and Priests against Jesuits: yet forsooth these dogs and cats are all of one Cage, they are all members of the Romish Church. William Middleton, Papisto-Mastix or the Protestants Religion defended (London, 1606) In this oddly engaging and coincidentally timely effusion, Middleton was concerned, of course, to identify, postulate, or construct a unifying context of deplorably shared commitment within which the conflicting views and activities of a seemingly disparate array of historical agents could properly be understood. And in this, had not the practitioners of what is sometimes referred to as "the new history of political thought" themselves proscribed the use of the word in that way, Middleton might well have been said to have "anticipated" their own later preoccupation with contextualization.' In focusing our attention over the past quartercentury and more on the difficulty of wresting genuinely historical meanings from the texts handed down to us from the past, these particular representatives of the linguistic turn in the study of the history of ideas have persistently emphasized the importance of reading such texts in their historical (and especially linguistic and ideological) contexts.' Straightforward enough, it might seem, but it is one of the intriguing and fruitful byproducts of this approach that it has served also to draw to our (perhaps reluctant) attention the less obvious difficulties and complexities attaching to the very notion of context itself.' It is with this latter issue that I shall be concerned in what follows. Dominick LaCapra has well reminded us that if, in pursuit of the interpretation of texts, we wish to address the matter of context, we must begin by recognizing that "contexts of interpretation are at least threefold: those of writing, reception, and critical reading." Even if, endorsing the preoccupation with authorial intentionality characteristic of the "new historians," we concentrate on the first of those contexts, the picture is complex enough. And not least of all because such contexts "are encountered through the 'medium' of specific texts or practices, and they must [themselves] be reconstituted on the basis of textual evidence."5 In one of the earliest (and most anguished) of critical responses to the type of linguistic and ideological contextualism proposed by Quentin Skinner, Parekh and Berki felt it necessary to insist that "context is not something obvious and given," but something that "has to be constructed, indeed, created by the commentator."6 Reaffirming that point a decade later, David Boucher noted further that "the scale of [contextual] construction depends upon the historian and the lengths to which he is prepared to go in order to relate what may on the surface seem disparate utterances. And he did so, having confessed, in the course of commenting on a whole series of "new histories" of political thought inspired by Skinner's approach, that he simply could not "elicit any agreement from the literature on what a context actually is and how it is related to the texts."' A gloomy confession, it may be, but it is one well adapted to the role for which I wish to press it into service, namely, that of setting the historiographic stage for the introduction of the very particular contextual tangle on which I propose in this essay to focus and which may serve, I believe, as a good illustration of the degree to which the contexts we construct in our efforts to interpret historical texts determine what we see or (perhaps, more important) what we fail to see or to regard as noteworthy in those texts. I Although our own effort at contextualization will draw us back insistently as far as the fifteenth century, that effort is rendered somewhat problematic in that our story actually begins in Venice toward the end of April,1606. …