Search Results

Although Marsilius has doubts about the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine, it is too important to his argument for him to reject it. For it records the emperor ceding legislative power to the bishop of Rome. This, for Marsilius, was the point at which Christian history began to go awry. Previously, the bishop of Rome had of necessity come to exercise quasi-jurisdictional powers over Christians, because the emperor was not fulfilling this role, but was, rather, persecuting them. Constantine's fatal but providentially ordained act provided the basis on which claims to plenitudo potestatis were asserted by later bishops of Rome. Over time, these claims became more and more extreme. They came to be embodied in canon law, sanctioned by bishops of Rome who called themselves popes, rather than by emperors. This is the singular cause of discord of which Aristotle had known nothing, because it had come into being long after his death.

This chapter looks at the establishment of the Carolingian Empire. It begins with a discussion of the Donation of Constantine: which claimed to be a text from the fourth century, was forged in the late eighth century, and finally exposed as such in the fifteenth century by Nicholas of Cusa and Lorenzo Valla. The chapter then moves to a discussion of the crowning of Charlemagne, and the practices of political ritual and naming that accompanied it. A range of works are analysed to show what precisely was being established: a new Roman Empire, a political form of Christendom, or more simply a Frankish kingdom. The position of Europe, particularly in relation to the rise of Islam, is discussed. The chapter moves to a discussion of cartography from Rome to the Medieval period. Cartography is a key political practice that both represents and produces political space. Jerusalem is often centrally located on maps of this time, providing a context in which to understand the crusades undertaken to recapture it. The chapter ends with a discussion of feudalism, stressing the political-economic importance of property in land and practices that went alongside it.

Fall of Princes is one of the most consistently partisan poems Lydgate ever wrote: in addition to his complicity in national politics, Lydgate, a member of the abbey community at Bury St Edmunds, was caught up in ecclesiastical power struggles. This chapter analyses the Fall as an expression of Benedictine orthodoxy and discusses the ways in which Lydgate adapts the poem to articulate the superiority of spiritual authority over secular power. Key narratives (such as those dealing with Roman persecution of Christianity, the emperors Theodosius and Julian the Apostate, and the Donation of Constantine) are analysed with reference to the French source. Contextual evidence is given for the topicality of these issues in Lydgate's home monastery at Bury, including specific conflicts between the abbey and William Alnwick, bishop of Norwich, over questions such as clerical taxation and the examination of the Lollard heresy in the diocese.

This chapter discusses Pope Nicolas I and the alliance of papacy and Frankish empire in the assertion of Roman authority. The nine and a half years of Nicolas' tenure of papacy were marked by the strongest affirmations of his Petrine authority to govern all churches in the universal body. Nicolas also came to know and use the False Decretals, a brilliantly constructed corpus of canon law, mingling authentic conciliar canons and papal decretals with spurious texts. The Decretals offered a solution to a problem which had long caused difficulty to the papacy, that canon law had been made by primatial authority but by provincial councils, which the bishops of Rome or Carthage or Constantinople were expected to enforce. The Donation of Constantine or Constitutum Constatini. By this Emperor Constanine bestowed on Pope Silvester and all his successors' jurisdiction to decide on all matters affecting Christian faith and worship, and the right to permanent residence in the Lateran Palace.

This chapter begins by showing how closely interlinked are the first and second discourses of the Defensor Pacis. They were intended as complementary investigations of the most grievous cause of discord in the modern world. Discourse I investigates it on the basis of reason, which means primarily Aristotle, and discourse II on the basis of Christian truth, based on Scripture and other sources for the early history of Christianity. Marsilius argues that this particular cause of discord is the papacy. He sketches a providential history that began at the Fall, and looks forward to the Last Judgement. He sees Christ's advent under the newly established Roman Empire as a providential sign of the Empire's unique, ordained role in God's scheme to redress the effects of the Fall. The ultimate source of this view is Orosius. With Constantine's conversion, recorded in the Donation he made to Sylvester, bishop of Rome, the Empire and church began to be elided, at the emperor's instigation.

This chapter examines texts in which a medieval poet, Dante Alighieri, and a Renaissance humanist, Lorenzo Valla, handle the historical drama which controlled the European imagination for at least a thousand years: the drama of Pilate and Jesus. Both writers treat the gospels’ trial narratives in a that way reveals, to their minds, the corruption of the medieval “papal monarchy” (as it is called). For both Dante and Valla, the crucial moment is that in which Jesus renounces, before Pilate, “the kingdoms of the world”. If Jesus had not made this “great refusal”—as first formulated by Augustine, and received by Dante, Valla, and later European philosophers—there is reason to believe that the secular could not have been theorized, or progressively actualized, in Europe.

Chapter Two argues for the central role of speculation about authorial personality and motive in one of the foundational masterpieces of modern historiography: Valla’s treatise, famous for debunking the forgery posing as Emperor Constantine’s “donation” of the western empire to the church. This chapter shows how the aspect of Valla’s text most often singled out for praise by scholars—its exacting philological account of the Donation—is procedurally bound to, even enabled by the aspect of the text least condign with modern canons of academic practice: its use of elaborate, often humorously biting ethical conjecture as a form of proof, including invented speeches or prosopopoeiae by Constantine’s contemporaries and a vividly disparaging personality imagined for the Donation’s forger. In Valla’s hands, not only contextualized lexical analysis but also the educated reconstruction of historical character from textual evidence—including that of the author-forger himself—is critical historiography.

The Introduction gives an overview of the critical fortunes of the book’s four key terms, with attention to both their traditional function and their recent challenging from a number of critical standpoints. No longer, the chapter argues, can these longtime givens of literary study be taken for granted. In the context of this reappraisal, anachronism, once vilified for its violation of the other three terms (chronological succession, period coherence, and the divide between “the age of faith” and the “secular age”) has emerged as a promising heuristic. And yet that term is not so easily abstracted from the schema. It, too, is a feature of modern “historical consciousness,” its emergence often marked by Lorenzo Valla’s celebrated detection of anachronisms in his invalidation of the Donation of Constantine, the document on which the papacy based its imperial claim. Yet Valla exposes the forgery by discovering not historical errors but rhetorical and grammatical gaffes. While this chapter’s implications apply to literary studies generally, its focus is on Shakespeare Studies, both in practice and in often tacit presuppositions.

Chapter 7 investigates the multiple ways arguers can question the legitimacy of an interpretation, thereby entering the stasis of jurisdiction. There are two main points of contention in this stasis: whether the person issuing the interpretation has the right to do so, and whether the interpreted text has any authority on the issue at hand. Other concerns involve the place, time, style, and delivery of an interpretation, as well as the hermeneutic method behind an interpretation. This chapter’s extended analysis examines the lines of argument fifteenth-century Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla employed to discredit the forged Donation of Constantine, an imperial decree allegedly written by Constantine the Great that ceded power over the Western Roman Empire to the pope. Studying the types of arguments people use in the stasis of jurisdiction reveals the specific ways that communities manage, control, and coordinate acts of textual interpretation in alignment with their values.

Relationships between popes and kings have often been seen, first, as feudo-vassalic, and secondly as part of a general attempt by medieval popes to elevate themselves to world rulership. This introduction outlines the historiographical background and the broader implications of this book’s argument. In general, the emphasis on petitions as the driver of papal government—a central part of this book—has much in common with recent approaches to pre-modern government more generally. The interest now is in what subjects are able to get out of central governments, why and how subjects approach governments, and what effect this has on the authority of the ruler.

Eastern Roman control of central Italy became increasingly tenuous as the eighth century progressed. The result was a series of popes gradually exercising greater independence from Constantinople. By the middle of the century, popes had begun using the rhetoric of Roman restoration to provide grounds for papal assumption of territorial control over stretches of central Italy taken from the Lombards by the Franks. Papal temporal authority then rested on a forged document called the Donation of Constantine, a document whose claims underpinned Leo IIl’s crowning of Charlemagne as Roman emperor in 800. Although Charlemagne’s Roman imperial title was manufactured, his new Western Roman Empire was framed as a restoration of traditional Western Roman prerogatives that had fallen away—and his new capital at Aachen embodied this transition with buildings constructed from old Roman materials taken from Italy.