In recent years, historians of medieval administration have become increasingly interested in hierarchies of power and the delegation of power. A number of significant studies have focused on the administrative organization of the Church, covering such topics as papal legates and judges delegated by the papacy, or the conflicts provoked by the emergence of a new figure in the bishop's administration, the official. Analysis of the enhanced distinction between the power of order and the power of jurisdiction has also led to new approaches to the study of medieval ecclesiology. Equally, accountability has been the subject of growing interest, whether in the monastic world or more recently in the context of clerical administration. To some extent, this rich historiography reflects the existence of contemporary debates which led to a more precise vision of the internal structure of the Church, whether it concerned papal authority, or the respective areas of action of the bishop and the other dignitaries of the cathedral church – as illustrated by the conflict between Bishop Grosseteste and the chapter of Lincoln Cathedral between 1239 and 1245.

When it comes to the exercise of temporal power, however, complex theoretical arguments appeared later than in the Church. In the later Middle Ages and early modern period, civilian lawyers put into place a hierarchical conception of authority and power in the temporal field, based on the concept of imperium. In France, the most complex expression of this is found in the work of Jean Bodin (1530–96). As David Johnston has shown, in the treatise Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566), Bodin divided the authority of a magistrate into two parts: one was attributed to the magistrate by law, while he received the other by virtue of his office, a distinction Bodin borrowed from the Roman jurist Papinian. Bodin's aim was to limit the degree of merum imperium which any magistrate could claim to hold. In the Six livres de la république published ten years later, the agenda was different. In a conceptual framework that borrowed heavily from civil law, Bodin now aimed at defining the nature of sovereignty (which he identified with the concept of maiestas): this he did by determining which powers the sovereign could concede without any loss to himself.