Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear: Jacques de Thérines and the Freedom of the Church in the Age of the Last Capetians

by William Chester Jordan

This absorbing book explores the tensions within the Roman Catholic church and between the church and royal authority in France in the crucial period 1290-1321. During this time the crown tried to force churchmen to accept policies many considered inconsistent with ecclesiastical freedom and traditions--such as paying war taxes and expelling the Jews from the kingdom. William Jordan considers these issues through the eyes of one of the most important and courageous actors, the Cistercian monk, professor, abbot, and polemical writer Jacques de Thérines. The result is a fresh perspective on what Jordan terms the story of France in a politically terrifying period of its existence, one of unceasing strife and unending fear.


Jacques de Thérines was involved in nearly every controversy of the period: the expulsion of the Jews from France, the relocation of the papacy to Avignon, the affair of the Templars, the suppression of the heresies of Marguerite Porete and of the Spiritual Franciscans, and the defense of the exempt monastic orders' freedom from all but papal control. The stands he took were often remarkable in themselves: hostility to the expulsion of Jews and spirited defense of the Templars, for example. The book also traces the emergence of King Philip the Fair's (1285-1314) almost paranoid style of rule and its impact on church-state relations, which makes the expression of Jacques de Thérines's views all the more courageous.

170 pages, Hardcover

First published December 20, 2004

About the author

William Chester Jordan is an American medievalist who serves as the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University; he is a recipient of the Haskins Medal for his work concerning the Great Famine of 1315–1317. He is also a former Director of the Program in Medieval Studies at Princeton. Jordan has studied and published on the Crusades, English constitutional history, gender, economics, Judaism, and, most recently, church-state relations in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Reviews

[Anatolikon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tells the story of the early fourteenth century through the figure of Jacques de Therines, an influential Parisian master and Cistercian, and especially Jacques's struggles over the rights of the church and his order. These rights were called into question by Philip IV on a number of occasions, namely for the provision of Cistercian money for war, an uncanonical arrest of a bishop who said Philip looked like an owl, and the trial of the Templars. Jacques raised questions about the powers that were in both unofficial (quodlibets) and official (the Council of Vienne, John XXII's commission on the Spiritual Franciscans) contexts. He appears to have had a penchant for taking unpopular positions, such as questioning the decision of Philip to expel the Jews, raising issues about the confession and guilt of the Templars, and even defending the exemptions of the Cistercian Order against a pope by using the authority of his own office against him.