Les libertez de l'eglise gallicane

by Pierre Pithou

Paris: Mamert Patisson chez Robert Estienne, 1594

27, [1] leaves | 8vo | A-G^4 | 163 x 100 mm

One of five editions that appeared in the pamphlet’s first year, accompanied by two more Pattison editions in Paris, plus two in Lyon. A few more appeared early in the next century, and in 1609 it was a key text in the much larger Traitez des droits et libertez de l’eglise gallicane. ¶ Pithou’s work laid the modern foundation for Gallicanism, a religious-political philosophy which, tapping into some of the earliest Christian thought, sought to restrict the pope’s jurisdiction over non-spiritual affairs. The Catholic Church, in short, should not have carte blanche to mettle in the affairs of state. This challenge to papal primacy perhaps emerged in France in the 14th century, but it remained something of a sleeping lion until the assassination of Henri IV in 1610, which catalyzed the sentiment. It culminated in the 1682 Declaration of the Clergy of France, and even spread beyond Gallic borders, though the French Revolution severely halted its advance. ¶ Pithou was hardly the first to publish on the subject, but this brief work “was to become by far the most famous and influential statement of the legal specificities of the Gallican liberties,” and “remained the definitive summary of the subject down to the end of the old regime” (Parsons). Pithou drew heavily on the earlier work of Gilles Bourdin, though he “developed it into a detailed exposition of the limits on ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the rights exercised over it by the secular arm.” He ventured into the weeds of this landscape, and “carefully delineated the kinds of cases they could not hear, the kinds of penalties they could not impose, and the limits on their ability to derogate from established procedures and delegate authority.” Separation of church and state. Plus ça change, non? ¶ We find no other copies of any 1594 editions at auction, and WorldCat reports no print copies of any 1594 editions in North American libraries.

PROVENANCE: Several early French annotations throughout, perhaps in two different hands. These are partially cropped and often difficult to make out, but they do seem to betray close engagement with the text and real knowledge of the subject. One on fol. 8v, for example, responds to a passage citing a 1546 Toulouse arrêt ([A]insi juge…); another on fol. 11r adduces a papal bull of 1576.  ¶  Author’s name inked on the title in an early, perhaps contemporary, hand.

CONDITION: Without a binding, and probably removed from a larger Sammelband, but holding together well. Printer’s device on title. Last leaf is blank. ¶ Corners creased, edges dusty, and some short tears in the head and tail of some spine folds; first gathering released from the topmost thread, but remains firmly attached; cropped close, affecting the marginalia.

REFERENCES: USTC 52153 or 7525 (records insufficiently distinguished; the other 27-page Patisson edition lacks Robert Estienne’s name in the imprint); Barbier, Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes (Paris, 1873), v. 2, col. 1312; Brunet, Manuel du libraire, suppl., p. 243-244 (“this handsome and famouse book served as the basis for the Declaration du clergé of 1682”); Renouard, Annales de l’imprimerie des Estienne (Paris, 1843), p. 189   ¶ Jotham Parsons, Church in the Republic: Gallicanism & Political Ideology in Renaissance France (Catholic Univ of America, 2004), p. 126 (along with his Ecclesiae gallicanae in schismate status: “Those two pamphlets together generally formed the nucleus of later erudite Gallican collections”), 127, 128 (Pithou provided at the end “an important step in the development that linked history, counsel, and the Parlement’s ecclesiastical jurisprudence to the viability of the state, but it also marked the full emergence of erudite Gallicanism as a tradition and of the erudite Gallicans as a party in French affairs.”); Joseph Bergin, The Politics of Religion in Early Modern France (Yale Univ, 2014), p. 68 (“Of the three attempts at synthesis made in the 1590s, the one that was to have the most enduring impact was Pierre Pithou’s Les libertez de l’église gallicane”); Constantin Fasolt, “Die Rezeption der Traktate des Wilhelm Durant d.J. im späten Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit,” Das Publikum politischer Theorie im 14. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1992), p. 76 (“the classic text from which parliamentarians drew, especially in the 18th century,” citing J. Carreyre, “Pithou,” Dictionnaire de théologie catholique 12.2 (1935)); Fred Schreiber, The Estiennes (1982), p. vii (“there is no such thing as an unimportant Estienne book”)

Item #519