The lack of precision in the medieval political vocabulary and the great diversity of literary genres involved in studying it make it far from easy to provide a full explanation of community, council, representation and constitution over the three hundred years from 1150 to 1450. In addition to that, the words themselves can refer to widely varying social and political realities. It is only very recently that law, ethics and politics have come to be considered independently of each other: the middle ages had no such divisions. Roman law and canon law are used with a liberal disregard for the texts and their original purpose which would be almost inconceivable today, and one result of this is that one may well come across material of prime importance to the subject under consideration here mentioned in passing in a theological commentary on some quite different topic. Medieval thinkers, in other words, tended to see human social and political affairs as one part of a whole, to think of man himself in relation to the world, to his fellow-men, and to God. There was some attempt, following the Latin-speaking West's rediscovery of Aristotle, to unify terms and ideas under his influence: that is precisely the significance of the ‘commentaries’ on Aristotle, particularly those on the Politics and the Nichomachean Ethics. These must be understood as commentaries in the broad sense, for in fact one finds Aristotle's thought in treatises which, while not pure commentaries, use his ideas at least as much as the formal commentaries, if not more.