Edmond Richer, The Sorbonne and the metamorphoses of conciliarism

Conciliarist thought, which had seemed to freeze in time in sixteenth-century France, found renewed strength at the dawn of the seventeenth century thanks to the efforts of Edmond Richer, the syndic of the Paris Faculty of Theology from 1608 to 1612. Richer claimed to merely be restoring the old doctrine of the University of Paris. He defended the reputation of Gerson, who was unfairly attacked by Cardinal Bellarmine. Sorbonne theologian André Duval assured, on the contrary, that Richer was betraying the School of Paris. An examination of the documents born of this controversy shows that, by and large, Richer followed Gerson but that he solidified his positions and those of his successors, giving them a coherence and a homogeneity that they did not have. This episode had profound consequences on the magisterium of the Sorbonne.