Guardians of Law and Tradition: The Parlement of Paris During the Reign of Francis I – Selected Documentary Sources
Mediaeval Sources in Translation 65 • viii, 160 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-315-1 • Paper • $30
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The sixty cases presented here in English translation are drawn from French documents registering the proceedings of the Parlement of Paris during the reign of Francis I (1515–1547). Functioning as the supreme court, the Parlement dealt with crimes against persons and property, but also and increasingly with matters concerning the orthodoxy of faith.
In the early sixteenth century, France saw the rise of two new movements challenging traditional thought and practices: Humanism and the Reformation. The humanists sought changes to the curriculum, advocating a return to classical sources, promoting the study of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and editing and translating biblical texts. They were seen by the Faculty of Theology as challenging their authority and their teaching practices, which were based on the Latin Vulgate and medieval scholastic texts.
The theologians were also concerned with the rise of Lutheranism, which they saw as heresy, and with the actions of those who supported the Reformation. Cases of heresy came to preoccupy the Parlement and were seen as a priority by Francis, the “most Christian King.” Another concern evident in many documents is the enforcement of public order and morality, considered a duty of the state to avert the wrath of God and maintain prosperity.
These selected cases, made accessible to English readers for the first time, are witnesses to the history of early modern France, reflecting both legal practices and social norms.
Authors
Erika Rummel, Professor emerita in the Department of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, is the author of The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance & Reformation (1995) and more than a dozen other books, and the translator of four volumes in The Collected Works of Erasmus.
James K. Farge is a Fellow of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto. He is the author of Religion, Reformation, and Repression in the Reign of Francis I: Documents from the Parlement of Paris, 1515–1547 (2015), and of two volumes of the proceedings of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris, among other works.
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