It was Harold J. Laski who said “the road from Constance to 1688 is a direct one,” and he did so when speaking of the constitutional theories enunciated by the Conciliar thinkers and put into practice at the Council of Constance. These closely related theories had their roots deep in the corporative thinking of the medieval canon lawyers but sprang into prominence during the years after 1378, when the Western Church was divided first into two and then into three “obediences” under the sway of rival claimants to the Papacy. Basic to all the Conciliar theories was the central insistence that the final authority in the Church lay not with the Pope but with the whole body of the faithful and that the Pope possessed, therefore, not an absolute but merely a ministerial authority delegated to him for the good of the Church. This belief made it possible to appeal from the obduracy of the rival pontiffs to the decision of the faithful as expressed through their representatives assembled in a General Council of the whole Church, and such a possibility was actualized at the Councils of Pisa (1409) and Basel (1431-1449) and, most strikingly of all, at Constance (1414-1418). There it found expression, not only in the judgment and deposition of popes, but also in the promulgation of the decree Sacrosancta (1415), which declared:

Matthew Arnold

Perhaps it is somewhat less than fair that to one whose interests lie in earlier centuries than theirs, the recent exchanges between Donald J. Greene and Peter J. Stanlis should have called irresistibly to mind the closing lines of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach. Unfair, indeed, admittedly unfair, but not wholly without its moral. The strife has been ferocious and the crash of opposed artillery truly deafening. But the smoke remains dense, the objectives obscured, and so many of the projectiles hurled have spent their force on phantom targets. And why is this so? In part, no doubt, because of disagreements about the very nature of Dr. Johnson's views — but a medievalist would be presumptuous indeed to contemplate even the most tentative of interventions on this score. More germane to his interests, however, and surely no less fundamental to the impasse, is the dangerously impoverished historical landscape against which these views have been measured.

This comes out very clearly in Stanlis's abuse of the label “Calvinist” — for which Greene correctly upbraids him. It comes out, too, in Greene's reliance on that shopworn tag “Augustinian,” with which Stanlis is rightfully uneasy — though, conceivably, for the wrong reasons. But it comes out most clearly of all in the assumption, common, it seems, to both parties, that it is safe and meaningful to speak of the Scholastic conception of natural law.

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).