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  • Le Concile de Pise. Qui travaillait à l’union de l’Église d’Occident en 1409?
  • Margaret Harvey
Le Concile de Pise. Qui travaillait à l’union de l’Église d’Occident en 1409? By Hélène Millet. [Ecclesia Militans. Histoire des hommes et des institutions de l’Église au Moyen Âge.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2010. Pp. 443. €60,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-503-53198-4.)

This book is the culmination of many years of work. Hélène Millet explains that her first publication was a new list of the Council of Pisa in 1981 which might have been followed by a definitive study of the whole council had not circumstances intervened. She therefore decided to republish that first list with some earlier work. The first list now includes an index and additional notes, a chronological list of events, and republished articles comparing MSS Uppsala C 47 and Vat lat 3477 and discussing the representative nature of Pisa, the French delegation, the Angevins at the Council, and the Portuguese. Therefore, this is not a complete history of the Council, but rather is a series of reflections on how Pisa came to think the unthinkable (that a council could assemble without the pope); how representative it was; and why it has not been included among general councils, even though it began the healing of the Great Schism. Millet wishes to rehabilitate Pisa into the list of genuine Councils of the Church.

Millet underscores again the efforts of the cardinals who convened Pisa to make it as widely representative as possible; thus she stresses the importance of the numerous procurations. The English delegation was relatively small, but the proxies were many, and we know quite a lot about how they were gathered. The idea, according to Millet, was to ensure that the Council represented the universal Church as understood by jurists at the time. She guesses, however, that voting was almost certainly by prelates only (as was traditional) and that the assent of other delegates to the sentence of the Council was given after the decision had been taken.

The reader is left wondering whether Pisa really was the most important of the councils of the Conciliar Movement, as the author tries to persuade us. Pisa did not really offer a solution to the true crisis in the Church, because that crisis involved conflicting ecclesiologies. What is evident here is that the assembly did produce a case for a council called by the cardinals as a judge of erring popes, although that assent was by no means universal even in the West. But, on its own terms, Pisa was only justified if the popes were guilty; and so, in a sense, it was largely a propaganda machine. For this reason, it is hard to consider it as anything except an unclassifiable event, rather than a traditional council. It could be justified from past theory, but the charges against the popes were carefully fudged to align them with various theories to justify the action that was to be taken. Students of English history can see both how the Crown directed the assent and how the nature of the charges was left unclear, probably deliberately, to allow as wide an assent as possible.

This volume will be of value to specialists, and the index and commentary on the delegate list are well worth having. Pisa remains, however, an ambiguous [End Page 109] event. Perhaps it was the only answer possible to start the process of ending the Schism, and one should not try too hard to fit it into a traditional pattern for General Councils. Probably a new, complete history will reopen that debate.

Margaret Harvey
Durham University
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