La Vérité. Vérité et crédibilité: construire la vérité dans le système de communication de l'Occident (XIIIe–XVIIe siècle) ed. by Jean-Philippe Genet (review)

This weighty volume is the second in a series on 'Le Pouvoir symbolique en Occident (1300–1640)' published by the presses of the Sorbonne and the École Française de Rome. It contains most of the papers from the third international conference in the cycle 'Les vecteurs de l'idéel', held at Rome in 2012 as part of the 'Signs and States' program of the European Research Council. As its English title indicates, the focus of the research program is on the symbolic expression of politics, power, and the state in the late medieval and early modern period. This volume concerns the construction of truth as an instrument of political power. It comprises twenty-eight papers, including the introductory essay. Of these one is in English, one in German, and three in Italian. The rest are in French. The contributions are grouped in six thematic sections: philosophy and theology; language; art; law; political communication; history. The editor's lengthy introduction connects these disparate threads while making clear that his own particular interest is the unfolding of the Gregorian Reform's program of papal imperialism.

This theme is variably taken up by the different papers, which clearly cannot be gone into in any depth here. The philosophy section ranges through fourteenth-century nominalism and probabilism (with two papers on Jean Buridan), medieval understandings of Augustine on lying, and realist philosophies of truth from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. The Gregorian theme appears in a paper on the doctrine of the Real Presence as a justification for the clerical monopoly of the truth. In the section on language, two papers treat uses of truth by the sixteenth-century French Reformers and their opponents, while one paper deals with metaphor (transumptio) as a path to truth in writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The section on the visual arts considers the truth of visual representation as enunciated by Vasari in his sixteenth-century Lives of the Artists, the allegorical depiction of music in seventeenth-century paintings, the Grand Gallery of François I as a conscious exercise in political propaganda, the double-edged sword of iconography as a weapon of papal domination and local resistance, and the ambiguous status of the incognito which enabled prominent people to be unofficially present at important festive occasions they could not officially attend.

The section on the truth of the judge opens with Florian Mazel addressing Gregory VII's opposition of truth to custom in his attack on the ecclesiastical practices of his time. In pursuit of its Reform, the papacy assumed the absolute right to define the truth and ultimately defined it as the papacy itself. There follows truth and the role of the judge in seventeenth-century legal thought; the relationship between truth and scandal in fourteenth-century ecclesiastical confession and inquisition; the sixteenth-century trial of Gaston de Foix for tyranny and sodomy, leading to the annexation of his lands, and a similar confrontation between ecclesiastical and secular courts in sixteenth-century Venice.

In the political communication section, Elizabeth Brown proposes that Guillaume de Nogaret made up the entire Marguerite Porete affair as an exercise in self-promotion. The trial documents are forgeries, the chroniclers' accounts lies, and the fourteenth-century mystic never existed, therefore the book attributed to her cannot have been burnt or written. Brown seems to present no evidence other than general scepticism for her unusual view. Other papers deal with two works on truth by the fifteenth-century Burgundian polemicist George Chastelain, the resolution of the Great Schism, and Tudor debates on the theatre.

The final section on truth...