Tobias Daniels’s biography of Johannes Hofmann von Lieser delineates the career of a canon lawyer in the service of German ecclesiastical princes in the mid-fifteenth century. The career of Lieser, who is better known in the literature as Johannes de Lysura (the Latin toponym of his native village in the Moselle Valley), is presented by Daniels as a case study of the professional skills that made “learned councilors [gelehrte Räte]” valuable and often highly rewarded officials of territorial princes. Daniels presents Lieser’s career in the context of scholarship on German jurists who had studied Roman and/or canon law in Italy and then served as learned councilors of princes and cities in the (German) Holy Roman Empire. As his methodological models he cites a “cultural history of politics,” as set forth by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen? [2005]) and Luise Schorn-Schütte (Historische Politikforschung [2006]).

The springboard for Lieser’s career as a learned councilor was the Council of Basel (1431–49), which Daniels characterizes as a job market (“Kontaktbörse,” “Jobbörse”) for lawyers (65, 69). This evidently reflects Lieser’s perspective, although Daniels acknowledges that the synod’s primary agenda was indeed different (57): to uproot heresy (particularly in Bohemia), to promote peace among Christian princes, and to reform the life and morals of the clergy in head and members. By March 1434, Lieser was recruited as an expert canonist by representatives of the elector (Kurfürst) and archbishop of Mainz (61, 66–69), and, after the old elector’s death (June 1434), was appointed by the cathedral chapter of Mainz as its vicar-general. This led, in turn, to Lieser’s appointment by the new elector and archbishop-elect of Mainz, Dietrich von Erbach (July 1434), as his envoy to Pope Eugenius IV to obtain the confirmation of his election and the conferral of the pallium. Well satisfied with the service of his envoy, the elector of Mainz appointed Lieser as his representative (procurator) at the Council of Basel (May 1435), and subsequently (Febuary 1436) with the title of vicar–general (72, 75). This title is, however, misleading, since Lieser was not charged with spiritual matters in the see of Mainz, but rather with defending the elector’s interests in jurisdictional disputes at the synod. As recompense, the elector Dietrich von Erbach rewarded Lieser with valuable benefices in Mainz.

The open conflict between the Council of Basel and Eugenius IV, which broke out in 1437, led the elector to recall Lieser from Basel by October of that year. Lieser’s role was, however, only that of a technical adviser, and his lord, the elector of Mainz, remained neutral in the church conflict until 1446. As Daniels notes, it was only in February 1447, when the option arose of recognizing the position of Eugenius IV linked with guarantees of a future general council, that Lieser acted on his own in seconding in Rome the efforts of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the envoy of the emperor Frederick III, to persuade other German envoys at the Roman curia to recognize the dying Eugenius IV as the “undoubted” pope (188–94). For their support of the claims of the Roman see both envoys were richly rewarded: the newly elected Pope Nicholas V made Piccolomini bishop of Trieste (April 1447), while he granted to Lieser an indult to hold as many as five normally incompatible benefices, made him an honorary papal chaplain, a titular auditor of the Roman Rota, and later provided him with a canonry at the cathedral of Speyer (194–98)—a rarity for a commoner. It was the quest for and receipt of such exceptions to due process that earned Lieser, as Daniels notes, the reputation among his contemporaries as a “perverter of the laws” (13–14, 101–07). Daniels also provides an overview of Lieser’s brief career as a professor of canon law at the University of Louvain in Brabant (277, 293). Lieser died unexpectedly in 1459. As an honorary papal chaplain and auditor of the Roman Rota, Lieser was technically a member of the Roman curia, and therefore most of his benefices became subject at his death to provision by the Roman see.

Daniels’s biography of Johannes Lieser is an impressive case study of a learned canonist in the service of fifteenth-century German spiritual princes. Unlike Nicholas of Cusa, with whom he is often compared, Lieser was not a wide-ranging speculative thinker, but remained primarily a canon lawyer in the service of princes, intent on securing his own material benefit. Daniels also demonstrates that Lieser’s career was foremost that of a diplomatic agent, rather than a resident administrator like a chancellor (485–91). Daniels has structured his text by providing intermediate conclusions (“Fazit”) of major chapters, aiding the reader in following his argument. There is, however, a mistaken identification. Daniels refers to the temporary president of the Council of Basel as “Bischof von Konstanz” (167), whereas this episcopus Constantiensis was bishop of Coutances in Normandy. The book’s bibliography of sixty-six pages, listing manuscript as well as printed sources and the literature on learned councilors—critically reviewed in the notes—will be invaluable to other historians. Appendixes provide illustrations of Lieser’s handwriting in the manuscripts cited by Daniels.