Giles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power. A Medieval Theory of Government ed. by Robert W. Dyson (review)

REVIEWS 234 other structures which had multiple phases and uses depending on the period. That being said, the authors were constant in implementing their chosen style of organization through the book, and do provide a short but helpful index which makes the issue less problematic. Despite these slight flaws, Byzantine Monuments is a very useful work. In part this stems from its singularity, as there are no works which cover nearly all the visible remains of Constantinople. Despite the limited number of footnotes, those that are given are sufficient for the purpose, generally directing the reader to works which directly address the monument. Also helpful is a glossary of terms (mainly architectural) which will be a great aid to readers unfamiliar with technical terminology. One of the real strengths, however, is its attention to many of the relatively unknown churches and other edifices, left over from the Byzantine Empire, which still exist today. The taxonomy of Byzantine Monuments in the realm of scholarly publications is a difficult task as it is an amorphous work: there is no architectural or historical analysis to speak of, but its coverage of the monuments, especially of the lesser known one, is outstanding; though the maps and drawings are somewhat impoverished, the photographs are both useful and also have significant aesthetic value; its descriptions can very from the technical to the basic, while its use of Byzantine sources as points of reference is good. Byzantine Monuments is a well conceived and well executed survey, and as an introduction to the surviving remnants of Constantinople it is a more than adequate source; it is not particularly useful for in-depth scholarship as it is somewhat lacking in critical analysis, but rather should serve as a starting point. EDWARD MCCORMICK SCHOOLMAN, History, UCLA Giles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power. A Medieval Theory of Government, ed. and trans. Robert W. Dyson (New York: Columbia University Press 2004) xxxiv + 406 pp. Over the past half century the Columbia University Press’s series Records of Western Civilization has proved fertile ground for those wishing to study earlyfourteenth century political theory composed by alumni of the University of Paris. Amongst its publications are counted an English translation of De recuperatione terre sancte (Walther I. Brandt, 1956), the detailed—if somewhat improbable—plan of Thomas Aquinas’s former student Pierre Dubois for the establishment of French hegemony in Europe, a plan loosely veiled under advice for the recovery of the Holy Land. The series also includes a translation of Marsilius of Padua’s classic blueprint for a properly ordered Christian society, Defensor pacis (Alan Gewirth, 1956). In the midst of the conflict that had erupted between Pope John XXII and Ludwig of Bavaria, Marsilius, the former rector of the university and, by the 1320s, a master in the Arts faculty, opted to take the side of the would-be emperor, composing a work which argued that all temporal authority, including that exercised by the church, was ultimately subject to the authority of the western emperor. Twenty years before the appearance of Marsilius’s Defensor pacis, Giles of Rome, the first Augustinian regent -master of the university and probably himself a pupil of Aquinas, composed a very different treatise on the relationship between spiritual and temporal power. REVIEWS 235 In common with Marsilius, Giles wrote at a time of political crisis. Yet, the man who ended his career as archbishop of Bourges and a familiar of the papal court came to rather different conclusions to those arrived at by the Paduan who would be labeled an “enemy of Holy Church, adversary of truth and son of iniquity,”17 and whose career peaked when he participated in the elevation of an antipope. With Robert Dyson’s translation of Giles of Rome’s key work, his On Ecclesiastical Power (De ecclesiastica potestate), the Columbia series adds a further work to its canon, one which will, like its predecessors, be of continuing interest to those studying political theory and late medieval ecclesiology. This work has an added appeal in that Dyson presents not only a translation of Giles’s treatise, but a parallel critical edition of the Latin text. Giles’s treatise is lengthy, repetitive...