Alexander Russell reevaluates the conciliarist movement of 1409–1449 and English investment in it. He contests the longstanding position that the English Church was too preoccupied with enforcing orthodoxy and too loyal to Rome to support the general councils, which many scholars have viewed primarily as vehicles of resistance to papal authority. Indeed, he argues, the English were “whole-hearted advocates of conciliar intervention when it came to carrying out the business of reform” (45). He foregrounds the importance to the development of political thought of the councils’ claim to represent the Christian community as a whole.
The opinion that the English were opposed to—or at least ambivalent about—conciliarism is based largely on the failure of English delegates to produce tracts supportive of the movement. While the English silence is “puzzling” (126), Russell admits, he maintains that one should not assume that silence bespeaks hostility to the goals of the general councils. To make his case, he adduces evidence from epistles, petitions, proposals, and sermons to recover a “multifaceted” (117) English response. Thomas Netter's Doctrinale, he argues, indicates that English enthusiasm for conciliarism was dampened by its perceived affinity with certain Wycliffite views. In particular, conciliar “resistance theory” seemed distressingly compatible with Wyclif's claim that ecclesiastical authority is conditional (117). On the other hand, the English could readily support conciliar theories of “representation and collective decision-making,” which “reinforced” their own “machinery of heresy detection and prosecution” (117). The accountability that was increasingly expected in fifteenth-century England of parish priests, church wardens, guild officers, and even royal officials would have predisposed English delegates to support the position that popes, like other officeholders, can and should be held accountable for their actions.
Conciliarism and Heresy is rich and dense. Russell discusses the competing interests of the English delegates to the councils, shifting ideological commitments (especially regarding the papacy), and divisions between the secular and regular clergy. Far from being relevant only to an educated clerical elite, Russell argues, the general councils registered the tensions between clergy and laity. He examines conciliar engagements with lay piety in the debates surrounding Eucharistic worship, the Hussite heresy, and the sanctity of Saint Bridget of Sweden.
The debates over Bridget's sanctity that erupted at the Councils of Constance and Basel demonstrate that the councils were concerned not only with heretics like Jan Hus but also with visionaries who subscribed fully to the doctrines of the Roman Church. Russell reads the controversy about Bridget's piety as a controversy over “popular devotion tout court, in which Bridget stood as a representative of the ordinary worshipper” (82). Jean Gerson, frankly skeptical of Bridget's visions of Christ and the saints, found her understanding of doctrine “shaky” and her piety too “theatrical.” Her famed asceticism was perhaps more indicative of pride than of holiness, he worried, fearing that the popular piety she inspired might all too readily morph into heresy. The English defense of Bridget at Basel, undertaken by an English bishop identified only as Reginald, was not only a defense of a holy woman but an affirmation of the value and constructiveness of lay piety generally.
Russell amply demonstrates that the general councils must be seen as more than a means to end papal schism and “situated within the ubiquitous fabric of collective government in Europe” (115). He shows how English experiences with local institutions, such as cathedral chapters, university colleges, and guilds, favorably disposed English delegates toward conciliar government, and how “unresolved questions surrounding the authority of the councils in doctrinal matters” inflected reformist discourse in the sixteenth century.
