Accueil Revue de l'histoire des religions 2 Popular Authority in Conciliar an This paper assesses the place of laypeople in the thought of 15 th -century conciliarists. The dangers associated with heresy inclined the conciliarists towards a restrictive view of lay participation in doctrinal debates and ecclesiastical government.
This paper argues that the intellectual method of the canonists as well as certain practical considerations account for their open-mindedness about lay participation in canonical elections. The relationship between the people and the priesthood would be dramatically renegotiated in the course of the next two centuries. This was often accomplished against a background of violent agitation, or the threat of this. The leaders of the Church in the fifteenth century were themselves witness to a militant outburst of reforming energy in Bohemia, which sought to allow the community, among other things, the right to enjoy the Eucharist on equal terms with priests, to preach and to enforce Christian justice 1.
Against this background, the reforming work of the fifteenth-century councils may appear very feeble. The council fathers stand open to the charge that they made no attempt to harness the popular energy of the period to strengthen the Church. Even the conciliar theorists, who seemed to lay such weight upon the power of the Church as a community, were, in the eyes of one modern historian, fatally compromised by their nakedly hierocratic aims.
The general councils were dominated by the higher clergy. Francis Oakley has pointed out that Ullmann neglected those aspects of conciliarism which made provision for lay attendance. This paper owes a huge debt to all these works. It wishes, however, to situate the thought of the council fathers in a context which may help to uncover the origins of their ambivalent attitudes towards laypeople.
The clericalism of the councils has usually been analysed within the intellectual framework of conciliarism. But the conciliarist texts generally devoted little space to the status of ordinary lay people within the congregatio fidelium and laypeople occupied a marginal position in the reform agendas of the councils. I wish to account for this omission. The uneasy balance between a regressive conservatism and a desire to stabilise lay-clerical relationships informs conciliar statements about popular participation.
