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  • L'Eglise du Grand Schisme, 1378-1417
  • Natacha-Ingrid Tinteroff
L'Eglise du Grand Schisme, 1378-1417. By Hélène Millet [Les Médiévalistes français, 9.] (Paris: A. et J. Picard. 2009. Pp. 272. €34,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-708-40848-7.)

Hélène Millet, after completing her dissertation on the canons of Laon's cathedral chapter, was recruited in 1982 by France's CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) to take part in a research program focused on the Great Western Schism, a subject that characterized her career as a researcher. The present volume is a collection of some of her works on the subject under the title The Church of the Great Schism.

The book begins by a foreword in which the author explains the origins of her interest in the Great Schism. She noticed an incompatibility between the Council of Pisa's reception by Laon's Cathedral Chapter and the contents of French handbooks of ecclesiastical history, inspired by Roman Catholicism. Consequently, she decided that she would try to elucidate the questions that had been tormenting her and, with the help of Bernard Guenée, she chose to apply a prosopographical method to a new population: French clerics pursuing solutions aimed at ending the schism. From her investigations on these topics, Millet has extracted the materials for the present volume. Every chapter is devoted to the Church, especially to the Church of France, grappling with a schism that was distorting it and looking for some solutions to give her beauty "with no speck or wrinckle" back (Eph. 5, 27).

Two chapters with a broader approach of the problems introduce and conclude the book: "The Great Western Schism Seen by Contemporaries: A Church's Crisis or a Papacy's Crisis" for the introduction and "The Pope's Great Pardon (1390) and the Great Pardon of the Holy Year 1400" for the conclusion. This latest choice is rather judicious, as it impels us to look beyond [End Page 800] the Avignon's obedience. Between these two wider sights, the book is organized around four main parts.

The first part, "The Assemblies of the Clergy," includes four chapters and helps us to understand why assemblies of the clergy are such an important characteristic of the Great Western Schism in France. The second part, "Lower and Upper Prelates on Benefices' chessboard," includes four chapters and introduces us to some of the clerics who became famous or whose conduct conveyed some new element of understanding. The third part, "Accounts and Witnesses," includes four chapters and examines the schism through a chronicler, Michel Pintoin; an account, Le Livre des Fais du Bon Messire Jehan Le Maingre dit Bouciquaut; and a relatively unknown witness, Jean de Sains. The fourth part, "Schism and Prophecy," includes three chapters and allows us to perceive how, in the world of prophecy, temporal concerns and eschatological perspectives meet in an insoluble amalgam.

Although the essays have already been published elsewhere, it is a great benefit to have them collected in a single volume.

Natacha-Ingrid Tinteroff
University of Paris II, Panthéon Assas, PRES Sorbonne Universities
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