Popes and Princes 1417-1517: Politics and Polity in the Late Medieval Church

Originally published in 1958 and as a third edition in 1971, this comprehensive account of political thought in the Middle Ages presents medieval thinking against the historical background which animated it. The main emphasis is on the currents of thought and action in which individuals and institutions played their part and the central theme is the growth of the conception of a religious-political commonwealth and its gradual replacement by the idea of the State.

John A. F. Thomson (1934 - 2004) was born in Edinburgh, and educated at the University of Edinburgh (MA Hons.) and Balliol College, Oxford (DPhil). In1960, he was appointed Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, where he became Professor of Mediaeval History in 1994. His principal area of research was fifteenth-century British and European history, especially church history, which formed the subject matter of four of his five monographs: The Later Lollards (1965), Popes and Princes (1980), The Early Tudor Church and Society 1485-1529 (1993), and The Western Church in the Middle Ages (1998). His third monograph, The Transformation of Medieval England 1370-1529 (1983), the first volume of the textbook series Foundations of Modern Britain, provides a more general purview of late-medieval England. He also edited Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century (1988), a set of proceedings from the annual Fifteenth Century Conference, which he had organised in Glasgow in 1986. A sixth monograph, The Genesis of Modern Europe, that examined the contribution made by northern European countries to the Renaissance, was left incomplete at his death. In 2013, a volume of reprints of his scholarly articles from 1963 to 2001 was published as Piety and Politics in Britain, 14th - 15th Centuries: The Essays of John A. F. Thomson, edited by Professor Graeme Small.