Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-gtxcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T01:57:40.568Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Ecclesiastical Roots of Representation and Consent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2018

Jørgen Møller
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Recent attempts to explain the development of medieval representative institutions have neglected a long-standing insight of medieval and legal historians: Political representation and rule by consent were first developed within the Catholic Church following the eleventh-century Gregorian Reforms and the subsequent “crisis of church and state”. These practices then migrated to secular polities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This was facilitated by the towering position of the Church in medieval society in general and the ubiquitous “areas of interaction” between religious and lay spheres in particular. I document these processes by analyzing the initial adoption of proctorial representation and consent at political assemblies, first, within the Church, then in lay polities. These findings corroborate recent insights about the importance of religious institutions and diffusion in processes of regime change, and they shed light on the puzzling fact that representation and consent—the core principles of modern democracy—only arose and spread in the Latin west.

Type
Reflection
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 1075 - 1084
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abramson, Scott and Boix, Carles. 2017. “Endogenous Parliaments: Urban Agglomeration, Technological Accumulation, and the Deep Roots of Executive Constraints in Europe.” Working paper. Available at http://cpd.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/abramson_boix_v17_sfa.pdf.Google Scholar
Berman, Harold J. 1983. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bisson, Thomas N. 2009. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Antony 1992. Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Antony 1998. “Popes and Councils.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, c. 1415–c. 1500, Vol. VII, ed. Allmand, Christopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Blaydes, Lisa and Chaney, Eric. 2013. “The Feudal Revolution and Europe’s Rise: Political Divergence of the Christian West and the Muslim World before 1500 CE.” American Political Science Review 107(1): 16–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boucoyannis, Deborah. 2015. “No Taxation of Elites, No Representation: State Capacity and the Origins of Representation.” Politics and Society 43: 303–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bradford, Phil and McHardy, Alison K.. 2017. Proctors for Parliament: Clergy, Community and Politics, c. 1248-1539. Martlesham: Boydell Press, The Canterbury and York Society.Google Scholar
Carpenter, David A. 1991. “Simon de Montfort: The First Leader of a Political Movement in English History.” History 76(246): 3–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, David A. 1996. “The Beginnings of Parliament.” In The Reign of Henry III, ed. Carpenter, David A.. London: The Hambledon Press.Google Scholar
Cerda, José M. 2011. “The Assemblies of Alfonso VIII of Castile: Burgos (1169) to Carrión (1188)”. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 3(1): 61–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dodd, Gwilym 2007. Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finer, Samuel E. 1997. The History of Government II: The Intermediate Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fukuyama, Francis 2011. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. London: Profile Books.Google Scholar
Howe, John 2016. Before the Gregorian Reform: The Latin Church as the Turn of the First Millennium. London: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Kagay, Donald J. 1981. The Development of the Cortes in the Crown of Aragon, 1064–1327. ETD Collection for Fordham University. Available at https://fordham.bepress.com/dissertations/.Google Scholar
Kay, Richard. 2002. The Council of Bourges, 1225: A Documentary History. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Kuran, Timor. 2004. Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laiou, Angeliki E. 2000. “The Byzantine Empire in the Fourteenth Century.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, c. 1300–c. 1415, Vol. VI, ed. Jones, Michael. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Maddicott, John R. 1996. Simon de Montfort. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Maddicott, John R. 2010. The Origins of the English Parliament, 924–1327. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manin, Bernard. 1997. The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marongiu, Antonio. 1968. Medieval Parliaments: A Comparative Study, Vol. 32. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.Google Scholar
Møller, Jørgen. 2017a. “Medieval Origins of the Rule of Law: The Gregorian Reforms as Critical Juncture?” Hague Journal on the Rule of Law 9(2): 265–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Møller, Jørgen. 2017b. “The Birth of Representative Institutions: The Case of the Crown of Aragon”. Social Science History 41(2): 175–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Monahan, Arthur P. 1987. Consent, Coercion, and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy. Leiden: E.J. Brill.Google Scholar
O’Callaghan, J. F. 1989. The Cortes of Castile-Léon 1188–1350. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oakley, Francis. 2003. The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Oakley, Francis. 2010. Empty Bottles of Gentilism: Kingship and the Divine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (to 1050). New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Oakley, Francis. 2012. The Mortgage of the Past: Reshaping the Ancient Political Inheritance (1050–1300). New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pitkin, Hanna F. 1967. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Post, Gaines. 1964. Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State 1100–1322. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Procter, Evelyn S. 1980. Curia and Cortes in León and Castile 1072–1295. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Susan. 2012 [2000]. “Government and Community.” In The Middle Ages without Feudalism: Essays in Criticism and Comparison on the Medieval West, ed. Reynolds, Susan. London: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Runciman, Steven. 1977. The Byzantine Theocracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Southern, Richard W. 1956. The Making of the Middle Ages. London: Hutchinson & Co.Google Scholar
Southern, Richard W. 1970. Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Stasavage, David. 2010. “When Distance Mattered: Geographic Scale and the Development of European Representative Assemblies.” American Political Science Review 104(4): 625–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stasavage, David. 2016. “Representation and Consent: Why They Arose in Europe and Not Elsewhere.” Annual Review of Political Science 19: 145–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tierney, Brian. 1982. Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tierney, Brian. 1988. The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Ullmann, Walter. 1970 [1955]. The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.Google Scholar
van Zanden, Jan L., Buringh, Eltjo, and Bosker, Maarten. 2012. “The Rise and Decline of European Parliaments, 1188–1789.” Economic History Review 65(3): 835–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weyland, Kurt. 2014. Making Waves: Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America since the Revolutions of 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weyland, Kurt. 2016. “Crafting Counterrevolution: How Reactionaries Learned to Combat Change in 1848.” American Political Science Review 110(2): 215–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woodberry, Robert. 2012. “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.” American Political Science Review 106(2): 244–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar