A Companion to Giles of Rome ed. by Charles F. Briggs and Peter S. Eardley (review)

Giles of Rome has never quite made the A-list. Machiavelli, typecast as the Eminem of medieval political thought, enjoys instant name recognition alongside a reputation for being occasionally offensive. Aquinas, on the other hand, remains an enigmatic Beyoncé-esque figure; even those who have not dived deeply into his back catalogue recognize both his genius and his influence. If constructing a taxonomy of late medieval celebrity, Giles, however, would be a Lloyd Cole-like figure. This is, in part, because, despite a semi-dramatic shift in style late in his career, his work is marked by strong underlying themes. In the context of this slightly stretched metaphor, however, the most important point is that, beyond a devoted and knowledgeable fan-base, his name is likely to invoke hazy recollection among some over-forties while leaving most to reach for Google. While this Companion is unlikely to change that, it is not only a welcome addition to the shelves of those interested in late medieval thought, but a notable reminder of Giles’s influence among his contemporaries.

Today, Giles is probably best-known as a so-called papal hierocrat. His De ecclesiastica potestate sits alongside the work of James of Viterbo as the intellectual underpinning of Pope Boniface VIII’s ultimately disastrous attempt to pit papal theory against the reality of Capetian power at the start of the fourteenth century. A few decades earlier, Giles wrote what would become the most influential mirror of princes in the Middle Ages for the man who became Boniface’s most implacable foe, King Philip IV. At the same time, Giles was the dominant intellectual force within the Augustinian order, a university master, an archbishop, and a voice in favour of suppressing the Templars. As one of the editors, Charles Briggs, explains in the first chapter, the last thirty years have seen a renewed interest in Giles and his work. This entry in Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition series capitalizes and builds on this research to provide a rounded introduction. Following Briggs’s overview of Giles’s life, works, and legacy, seven chapters explore his approach to, respectively, theology; natural philosophy; metaphysics; cognition; ethics and moral psychology; logic, rhetoric, and language; and political thought.

Overall, the chapters are of an extremely high quality, written by leading experts in the field. Together, they draw attention to two questions: the degree to which Giles’s thought was shaped by Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, and the extent to which Giles himself stepped beyond his influences. They nuance our understanding while underlining strongly, as Roberto Lambertini highlights (p. 273), that drawing a simplistic dichotomy between Augustinianism and Aristotelianism is highly misleading. Generally speaking, the editorial quality is high. The book is equipped with excellent bibliographies and a comprehensive index. I spotted only one obvious typo (p. 13, n. 31: the date should read 1293, not 1393) and two cases of repeated words in Chapter 6. Nevertheless, it should be said that the formal introduction (pp. 1–5) is perfunctory; it is little more than a series of abstracts. Further, while most chapters include the Latin source material in their notes, Richard Cross’s discussion of Giles’s theology (Chapter 2) does not. Editorial intervention here would have ensured greater consistency. Constantino Marmo’s contribution (Chapter 7), while drawing attention to Giles as the first medieval commentator on Aristotle’s Rhetoric and offering analysis of his much-neglected commentary on the Posterior Analytics, like Chapter 2, ends abruptly without any summing up. This seems out of step with the volume as a whole. It is also unclear why Chapter 5 (Giorgio Pini’s ‘Cognition’) restricts itself to Giles’s mature thought, while Chapter 6 (Peter Eardley’s ‘Ethics and Moral Psychology’) takes a—welcome—longer view.

Inevitably, specialists will find points of contention in individual...