Sophie Vallery-Radot’s valuable prosopographic study of the French participants at the Council of Constance follows in the footsteps of the excellent studies of her mentor, Hélène Millet, concerning French participants at the Council of Pisa. The publication itself is unusual, consisting of a printed book accompanied by an online PDF of biographies that for all intents and purposes is really a second “volume.” The first volume, published in traditional format, examines the development of French national feeling at Constance. The second volume, Notices biographiques, is published online and is accessible free of charge on the Brepols website upon purchase of the first volume.

Before researching the biographical data on French participants at Constance the author undertook the difficult task of establishing a reliable list of those participants. In annex 1 of the first volume she details her sound method. She compared the five major extant lists of conciliar participants, using the lists to cross-check each other. Using other sources, including contemporary journals and the complete official acta of the council, she established the possible dates at which each participant was actually present during the council. Her final list of 274 clerical members of the French nation and a shorter list of lay participants are organized alphabetically by the first name of each participant, in modern French. However, in her analysis of the list of participants found in the official conciliar acta the author consulted only a small selection of manuscripts (a critical edition of this list would be highly desirable), and she does not accurately reflect the relationship among the manuscripts of the acta and between the manuscripts and the printed editions.

Each biographical notice in the second volume begins with the variant names of the participant found in the manuscripts (variants searchable in the online PDF text), followed by evidence concerning the individual’s participation at the council, their family, career, education, death and testaments, and coat of arms. Each also attempts to state their position, when known, on five major issues affecting the French nation at Constance (unity of the church, annates, the Petit affair, reform of the church, and the role of emperor-elect Sigismund at the council). The information is documented from many sources, including the conciliar acta themselves; other conciliar sources, such as the diaries of Fillastre and Cerretani, and Michel Pintoin’s journal; archival sources; and a wide range of relevant secondary works on local history and biography. Unfortunately, many assertions in the notices are not adequately documented, and many notices lack important information, such as the position taken by the participant in the annate debate; Vallery-Radot cites only about one-half of the known sermons preached by participants.

On the basis of this research the author offers in volume 1 valuable (but sometimes poorly reproduced) maps showing the geographic representation of bishoprics at the council, as well as helpful tables of various networks among the participants—both religious and political. She discusses the significance of both these networks and other networks of family and friendship. Her thorough work on the Burgundian network in particular sheds valuable new light on the Petit affair. In volume 1 the author seeks to demonstrate that the existence of a French conciliar nation at Constance contributed to the development of French national feeling. She thus attempts to nuance the previous scholarly consensus that the nations at Constance were primarily geographic constructs with little similarity to later nation states. Working in the context of mentalités studies of French national feeling, she seeks to show in the French conciliar nation a solidarity developing out of the humiliation caused by the English military victories and by emperor-elect Sigismund’s treatment of the French nation. She argues that the royal ambassadors played the major role in building this solidarity in the face of the many divisions within the nation. Using her biographical notices she sheds important new light on this insufficiently understood aspect of the council’s dynamics.

At the same time, the author’s discussions of the relationships among the conciliar nations at Constance often appear anachronistic, more related to nineteenth-century nationalisms. She speaks of the balance of powers among nations (289) and equates support for Sigismund with selling out French interests to German ones (312), charging Sigismund with using the Burgundians to undermine the French nation from within (381). And the author neglects what the subtitle of the book promises—an analysis of the French role at Constance in resolving the schism (and thus underplays the very significant contributions of the French to the council’s work). The members of the French universities at Constance played a crucial role in pursuing the policy of mutual cession of all three rival popes and in insuring that John XXIII’s flight would not dissolve the council. The author attributes this to the universities’ conciliarism (228–30), which she seems to equate with government of the church without a pope. She claims it was the absence of a pope at the council that unleashed a battle of the nations there and charges the universities with undermining the development of national sentiment at the council. In her analysis of the events of 1417 as growing French national sentiment opposing Sigismund, she relies too heavily on an uncritical reading of Cardinal Fillastre’s journal and thus misinterprets the role and policies of Sigismund at the council, not addressing the important research of Martin Kintzinger and not recognizing the fundamental importance of Sigismund’s leadership in securing the accession of the Roman and Avignonese obediences to the council.