John Slotemaker: John Mair and Church Power: Patristic Authority and 16th-Century Conciliarism

John Mair was the most influential theologian at the University of Paris in the first decades of the sixteenth century. In his theological writings he defended a version of conciliarism that he traced back to the long tradition of conciliarists at Paris (e.g., Pierre d’Ailly and Jean Gerson) and which he developed in his commentary on the book of Matthew (c. 1512) and in his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences. The present paper will consider Mair’s engagement with patristic sources (and those of his student, Jacques Almain) in his response to papalism (in particular, Thomas Cajetan). This use of sources is important to trace methodologically, given that within two decades of the publication of Mair’s commentary on Matthew the same texts would be hotly debated again, this time between Protestant and Catholic theologians defending divergent views of what the Church ought to be. Thus, while the paper will focus on Mair, and to some extant Almain, it will also gesture at the way in which patristic authority would play a somewhat different role in the conflagration that engulfed the Church in the sixteenth century.