Chapter 6 - Scholasticism in the Political Thought of the League

Summary

Chapter Six analyses the De Justa Reipublicae Christianae Authoritate (1590) of the pseudonymous ‘Guiliemus Rossaeus’ to demonstrate how a deep analysis of the relationship between natural and divine law, in scholastic terms, was used to justify the deposition and assassination of Henri III. Rossaeus' rich engagement with Jesuit and Dominican casuistry, and the Thomist commentary tradition, made his rejection of heretic tyranny a question of individual conscience as well as of French heresy laws. This demonstrates that Leaguer analyses of papal power at this academic level were not simply a recapitulation of medieval ecclesiological debates but offered a fresh synthesis of the Thomist sources. Such theories were as much a contribution to European Catholic political-theological debate as they were an immediate polemical response to Henri III’s perceived tyranny.