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THE BURDEN AND CONSCIENCE OF GOVERNMENT IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2007

Jeremy Catto
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Abstract

This study argues that the experience of government, though more clearly articulated after 1400, did not engender realpolitik and made princes and ministers, both the old nobility of service and the newer graduate careerists, more acutely aware of issues of conscience. It traces the anxieties provoked by political experience, their relation to the new spiritual literature addressed to persons with active responsibility, and their resolution after 1410 in a new, tough, realistic but morally sensitive approach to government, associated above all with Henry V of England.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 17 , December 2007 , pp. 83 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2007

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References

1 De quadripartita regis specie, ed. J.-P. Genet in Four English Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages (Royal Historical Society, Camden, fourth series, xviii, 1977), 22–39. On the genre see Wilhelm Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel des hohen und späten Mittelalter (Leipzig, 1938).

2 Augustine, De civitate dei, xix. 6.

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8 See McFarlane, Nobility of Later Medieval England, 243–5, and J. I. Catto, ‘Religion and the English Nobility in the Later Fourteenth Century’, in History and Imagination, Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (1981), 43–55.

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17 The letter is in Jean Gerson: oeuvres complètes, ed. P. Glorieux (10 vols., Paris, 1960–73), ii, 17–23.

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20 De praxi romanae ecclesiae, in Monimenta Medii Aevi, ed. C. W. F. Walch (2 vols., Göttingen, 1757–60), i, 24–6, 95, 99; a better but less easily available text is Mateusza z Krakova De praxi romanae ecclesiae, ed. W. Senko (Wroclaw, 1969), 86–7, 120–1, 122.

21 Salutati, Coluccio, De seculo et religione, ed. Ullman, B. L. (Florence, 1957)Google Scholar. See Witt, Ronald G., Hercules at the Crossroads (Durham, NC, 1983), 195–208Google Scholar. His earlier, unfinished and now lost De vita associabili et operativa was evidently a defence of the vita activa which his career, of course, exemplified.

22 Combes, A., ‘Sur les “Lettres de consolation” de Nicolas de Clamanges à Pierre d'Ailly’, Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age, 13 (1940–2), 359–89Google Scholar; Jean Gerson: oeuvres complètes, ed. Glorieux, ii, 105–7. See B. Guenée, Between Church and State (1991), 216–21.

23 The only indication is his supposed critical phrase about the papal prerogative of granting benefices ad votum suum, referring to the pope as an ‘overseas bishop’ as alleged by the dean of Oriel College, Oxford. This imputation on the archbishop's orthodoxy was however implicitly denied in his inquiry into the conduct of the Oriel fellows. See Snappe's Formulary and Other Records, ed. H. E. Salter (Oxford, Oxford Historical Society lxxx, 1924), 201.

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27 See for instance the two translated by Philip Vaughan, Philip the Good (1970), 22–4, 103–7.

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29 Ibid., 290 and note. A German example which deserves to be better known is the ‘political testament’ or advice to his successor composed in 1438 by Raban of Helmstatt, bishop of Speyer, in Karlsruhe, Generallandesarchiv 67/302, fo. 173, ed. F. J. Mone, ‘Politische Testament des Bischofs Raban von Speier’, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, 9 (1860), 193–201.

30 Walter Hilton's ‘Mixed Life’, ed. Ogilvie-Thomson, 15–16.

31 On the copying of texts as a religious exercise see A. I. Doyle, ‘Publication by Members of the Religious Orders’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), 109–23, esp. 114–16. Further devotional exercises in John of Angoulême's hand are in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS lat. 3638; see Gilbert Ouy, ‘Charles d'Orléans and his Brother Jean d'Angoulême: What their Manuscripts Have to Tell’, in Charles of Orléans in England, 1415–1440, ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Woodbridge, 2000), 47–60, see 54–5.

32 See Epistolario di Santa Caterina da Siena, ed. E. Dupré Theseider (Rome, Fonti per la Storia d'Italia, 1940), xxiii–xli, and on Maconi, Giovanni Leoncini, ‘Un certosino del tardo medioevo: Don Stefano Maconi’, in Die Ausbreitung kartäusischen Geistes im Mittelalter, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg, Analecta Cartusiana lxiii, 1987–91), ii, pp. 54–207. See Sargent, M. C., ‘Transmission by the English Carthusians of Some Late Medieval Spiritual Writings’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 27 (1976), 225–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Oswaldi de Corda opus pacis, ed. Belinda A. Egan (Turnhout, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis clxxix, 2001).

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35 Statutes of the Colleges of Oxford (1853), i, Statutes of All Souls College, 4. See Jeremy Catto, ‘The World of Henry Chichele and the Foundation of All Souls’, in Unarmed Soldiery, ed. J. K. McConica (Oxford, 1996), 1–13, see 6–7.

36 D. Bueno de Mesquita, ‘The Conscience of the Prince’, in Art and Politics in Renaissance Italy, ed. George Holmes (Oxford, 1993), 159–83, see 176–7.

37 N. Machiavelli, Il Principe, chapter xv.