Description: Almost on the eve of the sixteenth-century Reformation, the long-running debate over the respective authority of popes and councils in the Catholic Church was vigorously resumed. This book offers the first English translation of four major contributions to that debate. These complex arguments are fundamental for any society under government, whether church or state, and even on the threshold of the twenty-first century the concerns that underlie and animate these scholastic disputations continue to retain their force.
Review Quotes: "The collection is very helpful.... This collection should find a home on the shelves of historians, theologians, political scientists, and their graduate students interested in late medieval ecclesiology, particularly since this battle was joined just as the issues of ecclesiastical polity and authority were about to be re-evaluated in Luther's challenge and Rome's response." Christopher M. Bellitto, The Catholic Historical Review