Ian Levy’s With a Pure Conscience is an important and timely book from a leading scholar of late medieval theology and piety. From the very beginning, it seeks to puncture the still-persistent myth of Luther’s Reformation as the beginning of a new age of Christian liberty and conscience. For Levy, to make such a claim is to do the Middle Ages a gross injustice, and his book sets out to right the record. Unsurprisingly, hovering over the book is the ghost of not only Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms but also of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance as paradigmatic cases of medieval repression and the infringement of the rights of individual liberty and conscience—and readers will surely differ over how successfully Levy manages to exorcise these particular ghosts. Yet while questions of heresy loom large, the book is about much more than this. Indeed, throughout, Levy offers a lucid and spirited account of the medieval origins of fundamental notions of individual conscience and freedom, laying down a challenge to many conventional narratives. Revisiting ground seemingly well-trodden by scholars such as Brian Tierney and Francis Oakley, he also opens up an important new front for discussion of natural rights in both the narrative of the individual conscience and, perhaps more surprisingly, the theological culture of the Middle Ages.

Carefully crafted into seven chapters, the work has three main foci: freedom in a university setting, in the internal and external forum, and in the context of the papacy and Church authority. The first is the focus of Chapters One to Three, which also introduces many of the important theologians and canonists who recur throughout the rest of the book. Here, Levy offers an in-depth and beautifully worked account of the world of the scholastic Masters of theology expounding at length their sacred right to inquire into the truth in order to safeguard the Church. In doing so, he reveals the central importance of the magisterium of the theologians, too often eclipsed by a focus on the magisterium of the prelates. At the heart of this narrative is also the theological conscience. While decisively reconfigured by Abelard around internal intentions rather than external observance, Levy suggests that his account of invincible ignorance left too little space for error, leaving subsequent generations of theologians to explain how an erring conscience could arise from the fallible application of infallible moral principles and to probe how far it should be followed. Questions of freedom and conscience came to a pitch in issues of disputation and drawing on debates over the 1277 condemnations and the evangelical perfection of the Franciscan Order, Levy shows how theologians such as Godfrey of Fontaines and Henry of Ghent maintained the right of Masters vigorously to contest both episcopal and papal decrees, setting the stage for Ockham and the later discussion of individual rights and freedom.

Chapters Four and Five turn to the complex relation of the internal forum of conscience and the external forum of the ecclesiastical courts. Mirroring for the laity the Masters’ right to pursue truth was the common medieval view of the sacrosanct character of the individual conscience. For Levy, this is seen supremely in the penitential sphere and evidenced by the grave penalties that could accrue for breaking the seal of the confessional. However, he also puts forward the bold argument that it extended to the public forum as well, holding that the ecclesiastical courts’ scrupulous concern for due process gave rise to a new culture of natural and legal rights—resituating in the twelfth century what others have often ascribed to the fourteenth century. Of course, the supreme test case of this is the trial of Hus, and here Levy is at pains to show his judges at Constance as following correct process and doing their best for the welfare of the Church and even for Hus himself, insisting that he was not treated illegally, unfairly or even ultimately against the rights of his conscience—a claim meticulously argued but likely hard to swallow. Equally or perhaps even more controversial for some will be Levy’s examination of emotive issues of consent in marriage and baptism, where he maintains that forced marriages and forced baptism of Jews were the exception, going against the tenor of medieval ideals of freedom and toleration.

Chapters Six and Seven return to the intensifying dispute between the fourteenth-century papacy and the Franciscan Order by probing the relation of papal power to individual rights and freedom. Here, Levy takes up the key question of the plenitude of papal power, showing how the canonists developed a complex economy in which the Pope had the right to dispense from the law and interpret the Bible but could not contradict Scripture or apostolic tradition or relax the law to the detriment of the Church. Yet in practice, he concedes that this could be a murky issue. While fourteenth-century Popes sought to exploit ambiguities here against the Franciscans, leading figures like Olivi and Ockham hit back, arguing that papal power depends on the power of Christ and remains subject to his laws and crucially cannot abrogate anything—such as evangelical vows—that God has placed in the sphere of individual freedom. For Ockham, the individual Christian and certainly the theologian even has the right to correct an erring Pope. Subsequently taken up by Conciliarists, this ideal of the fraternal correction of the Pope gave rise to a powerful vision of the Pope as brother and self-sacrificing shepherd in Gerson and fed into the evangelical resistance of Wyclif and Hus. While divided in so much else, Levy thus argues that it was this spiritual vision of the papacy and the rights of Christians that became determinative for fifteenth-century reform. In doing so, both here and in the book as a whole, he provides us with a salutary reminder that the Reformation did not have a monopoly on issues of individual conscience and freedom and that medieval Catholics were just as concerned for the welfare of the Church as their Protestant critics.