BERTRAND, Pierre
PAPAL SUPREMACY
Tractatus [...] De origine Iurisditionum: seu de duabus Potestatibus temporali scilicet ac spirituali.
Paris, [Jean du Pre], [1520]£2,250.00
4to. ff. xiv. Roman letter. Publisher Regnault Chaudiere’s woodcut device to title, white on black decorated initials. Slight browning. An excellent, well-margined, clean copy in modern C20 boards covered with a C17 French vellum notarial document.
A very scarce early French legal imprint – a treatise on papal temporal and spiritual power. Pierre Bertrand (d.1349) was a lawyer and cardinal. This work, and others he wrote, were inspired by debates culminating in the Conférence de Vincennes (1329), when complaints were raised on how the French monarchy had been gradually reducing the rights of the Catholic Church and its privileges. Under Boniface VIII, the Pope’s pre-eminence over all ecclesiastical institutions in Christendom, as the Vicar of Christ, reinforced papal hegemony, with the help of new imperial symbols, such as the tiara and mitra, to signify the Pope’s imperial power. ‘Tractatus’ begins with an examinations of various basic principles: what makes a prince a prince, how a prince may gain power (by inheritance, succession or usurpation), what is the plurality of principalities, what is the nature of jurisdiction (the secular one being the sole remit of secular princes), how ‘potestas’ come only from God, how secular power pertains only to the Pope, and that, as they are deriving their temporal power from God alone, emperors should be crowned by the Pope. It is, in short, a compendium of all recent theories in support of the Pope having both temporal and secular power, in Rome and the world. A scarce, interesting work.
Only 4 copies recorded, none in the US, 1 at the BL. Not in USTC or Pettegree.