The third chapter looks at the Western reception of Dionysius the Areopagite in the early Middle Ages and the channelling of thinking on theosis through Dionysius into the Western mystical tradition. This tradition is examined from Bernard and Bonaventure to the Rhineland mystics and Nicholas of Cusa, revealing a constant concern to integrate the intellectual ascent to the vision of God with experiential participation in the Word by faith.

Charles V’s early death endangered the monarchical system he created, because his adolescent son faced massive urban rebellions, focused on the unpopular indirect taxes Charles V had created. Not long after the monarchy surmounted that challenge, Charles VI’s descent into madness led to a civil war between the Orléans and Burgundy branches of the family. The civil war necessitated a renewed series of theoretical justifications for monarchical power. The concurrent debates about papal v. conciliar supremacy had particular resonance in France because of Jean Gerson’s key role both in French political life and in the debates within the Church.Writers such as Jean de Terrevermeille, who transformed the “Salic Law” from a rarely cited myth into a largely accepted “fundamental law,” and Christine de Pizan, who created an explicitly French metaphor of the body politic, would have a determining influence on the next two centuries of French political discourse. The political prominence of multiple women placed gender at the center of French politics in this period, a pattern that repeated in the transition to the new vocabulary of State, after 1560.

Chapter Five focusses specifically on the issue of papal power, and particularly the heightening of tensions brought about by the question of receiving the Tridentine decrees in France. It aims both to contextualise the League debates, and to position them in relation to the ongoing question of the precise content of the Gallican liberties. In the work of lawyers, such as Antoine Hotman and Louis Dorléans, and theologians such as Gilbert Génébrard, Jean Porthaise and Jean Boucher, the deliberations over the Tridentine decrees are shown to be anchored in the context of a revival of late medieval conciliarism, and the still-resonant clash between royal and papal power embodied in the disputes between Boniface VIII and Phillip IV (1296–1303). From the problem of Sixtus V’s power of excommunication, to the troubled issue of Henri IV’s abjuration of Protestantism, this chapter further indicates that these debates, transformed and adapted from the medieval era, would go on to define Henri IV’s reign after 1594 and last well beyond the life span of the League itself.