Popes and Princes 1417–1517

This book, originally published in 1980, examines the history of the papacy in the century between the end of the Great Schism and the start of the Reformation, and considers how, and at what price, the popes were able to re-establish their power after the troubles of the years from 1378 to 1417. The author approaches the subject analytically rather than chronologically, covering such themes as theories of authority in the late Middle Ages, the problems of papal government and the potential areas of conflict between the popes and the secular princes. By concentrating on the period before 1517, the author stresses the importance of seeing the fifteenth century Church as the product of the conciliar crisis rather than as the cause of the Reformation although he suggests that the concession made by the papacy in this period created the political situation which made possible the divisions of Christendom in the sixteenth century. This work will be of interest to historians of the late medieval and early modern period, particularly those specialising in conciliar thought and Church history.

John A. F. Thomson (1934 – 2004) was born in Edinburgh, and educated at the University of Edinburgh (MA Hons.) and Balliol College, Oxford (DPhil). In1960, he was appointed Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, where he became Professor of Mediaeval History in 1994. His principal area of research was fifteenth-century British and European history, especially church history, which formed the subject matter of four of his five monographs: The Later Lollards (1965), Popes and Princes (1980), The Early Tudor Church and Society 1485-1529 (1993), and The Western Church in the Middle Ages (1998). His third monograph, The Transformation of Medieval England 1370-1529 (1983), the first volume of the textbook series Foundations of Modern Britain, provides a more general purview of late-medieval England. He also edited Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century (1988), a set of proceedings from the annual Fifteenth Century Conference, which he had organised in Glasgow in 1986. A sixth monograph, The Genesis of Modern Europe, that examined the contribution made by northern European countries to the Renaissance, was left incomplete at his death. In 2013, a volume of reprints of his scholarly articles from 1963 to 2001 was published as Piety and Politics in Britain, 14th – 15th Centuries: The Essays of John A. F. Thomson, edited by Professor Graeme Small.