The work involved in writing this article was in some measure assisted by a grant from the Johnson Fund of the American Philosophical Society awarded for the spring of 1969. I wish to thank Dr. Gordon Pruett, Assistant Professor of Religion at Northeastern University, for his great assistance throughout the writing of this paper and Dr. Allan Eister, Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College, for reading a final draft of this paper and making several helpful suggestions.

¹ For the most comprehensive review, see especially the papers read by Davis, Natalie, Theodore Brodek and Koenigsberger, H. G., and Swanson's reply, first heard at the meeting of the American Historical Association in 1969 and now printed in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1:3 (Spring, 1971), pp. 379–446.Google Scholar

² See Swanson's, The Birth of the Gods (Ann Arbor, 1960).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ Swanson, Religion and Regime (hereafter the only one of his two books to be cited), p. 24.Google Scholar

⁴ See Mcllwain, Charles Howard, Constitutionalism (Ithaca, 1958), especially chapters 4 and 5.Google Scholar

⁵ Swanson, , pp. 33–4.Google Scholar

⁶ ‘Bracton on Government’, Speculum, 28 (1963), pp. 306–9.Google Scholar

⁷ When Professor Samuel Thorne of Harvard University, the well-known authority on Bracton and English law, was consulted by this author on the use of gubernaculum and jurisdictio by Swanson, he saw no reason not to continue the distinction as long as it was made clear that Bracton did not make it.

⁸ The term centralist regime implies to the casual reader a strong, centralized government. While that may have been the case in some regimes so classified, it is important to keep two points in mind: (1) the medieval feudal regime was centralist in Swanson's eyes as well as absolute monarchies; (2) Swanson paid ‘little or no attention to the effectiveness of government’ (p. 59) in categorizing regimes.

⁹ Swanson, , pp. 58–60.Google Scholar

¹⁰ To analyze the bibliography which Swanson employed in making bis categorizations would take too long for the space permitted. Suffice it to say that he depended largely on secondary works in making his conclusions. While many of the works are excellent, in some instances he relied too heavily on survey-type textbooks, which are misleading in their generalization. For example, he used Strayer, Joseph R. and Munro, Dana C., The Middle Ages (New York, 1959)çGoogle Scholar, from which to draw his conclusions on the Magna Carta, thus perpetuating the idea that the Magna Carta gave formal recognition to the ability of the barons to punish any king for breaking the law, and to the necessity of having the barons' consent on all legislation and taxation. Had he used the work of J. C. Holt and others specifically dealing with the Magna Carta he would have been much more careful in his observations and thus much less expansive about the immediate importance of that document. See Swanson, , pp. 129–30çGoogle Scholar;. One very recent survey text, Hale's, J. R.Renaissance Europe, 1480–1520 (Fontana History of Europe, 1971) would have been helpful both to Swanson and to this reviewer had it been available earlier, because of its excellent comparative summary on European governments (see chapter 2).Google Scholar

¹¹ Although Swanson was more concerned with how a government functioned in theory than in practice, some attention to practice and less exaggeration of the importance of theory might have produced more evidence in support of his idea that commensal regimes usually stayed Catholic. In the case of the two Swiss cantons (Appenzell and Glarus) which adopted Protestantism, it seems highly questionable that they should have been placed in the category of commensal regimes. Appenzell's Protestant movement seems to have been a reaction of the outer districts to the inner districts. While it may be argued that in theory Appenzella's governmental system provided for a commensal regime, in practice, as Swanson himself admitted, the situation was quite different. The members on the Great Council were for the most part from the inner districts and thus ran the affairs of the city. Therefore, Appenzell should have been classified with the heterarchic regimes. Glarus seems also to have been a case where local interests were represented in the council which exercised gubernaculum and jurisdictio in the daily process of government, and thus it should also have been classified as heterarchic. Swanson probably classified it as commensal because in cases of emergency each member of the council could bring any three fellow citizens to the meeting of the council. Also the Landsgemeinde contained all adult male citizens.

¹² To say that all heterarchic regimes became Calvinist is somewhat misleading since some followed Zwingli, and certainly Zwingli and Calvin would have disagreed on many issues, one being the meaning of communion which plays such a key role in Swanson's thesis. However, Bullinger and Calvin subsequently came to an agreement in 1549, so the two sets of beliefs were not ultimately irreconcilable.

¹³ Swanson, , p. 206.Google Scholar

¹⁴ See xGottschalk, Louis, MacKinney, Loren C. and Pritchard, Earl H., The Foundations of the Modern World (1969), Part I, pp. 254–9.Google Scholar

¹⁵ This interpretation of Bohemia does not agree with Swanson's. He cited Bohemia as a centralist regime in 1500. That seems a strange designation in the light of what he said himself about the government. In the first place, he called it a mixed polity even in the fourteenth century, but he said nothing about the fifteenth century in which the Hussite movement started. In the second place, he wrote: ‘By 1500 the greater nobles had become the principal though not dominant force in the state, introducing a constitution which gave the diet power to vote taxes, regulate the use of monies received, and to fix the number of effectives necessary for the national defense … Under this regime, provincial officials were elected by the diet and took an oath to support the constitution’ (pp. 160–1). Surely that would make Bohemia at least a limited centralist regime on two counts (see the words which I have italicized in Swanson's text).

¹⁶ See Zeller, Gaston, Les Institutions de la France au XVI^e Siècle (Paris, 1948), pp. 143–5Google Scholar; and Shennan, J. H., The Parlement of Paris (Ithaca, 1968), pp. 114–15.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Shennan, J. H., Government and Society in France, 1461–1661 (New York, 1969), p. 35Google Scholar. See also Major, J. Russel, ‘The Renaissance Monarchy as Seen Through the Estates General’, Studies in the Renaissance, 9 (1962), pp. 113–25, where the view was put forth that the French monarchs of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were definitely limited by decentralization and localism.CrossRefGoogle Scholar 17a But see the modification on this point in Knecht's, J. important article, ‘The Concordat of 1516: A Reassessment’, Birmingham Historical Journal, 9 (1963), pp. 16–32Google Scholar. Reprinted in Hale, J. R.. ed., Government in Reformation Europe, 1520–1560 (London, 1971), pp. 91–112.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Although space does not permit further discussion of Swanson's centralist regimes, some correction is necessary for his treatment of Scotland as two separate polities. That does not seem legitimate even by his own standards as specified in his introduction: ‘My rule of thumb is to count as a society any population acknowledging a particular secular government as legitimate and as ultimately controlling in its affairs. In practice I judge that such a government exists if it grew naturally from the population whose common affairs it conducts and if it conducts foreign and domestic affairs without the permission and supervision of another power’ (pp. 44–5). In the first place, the Highlands recognized (though more in theory than in practice when the government in Edinburgh was weak) the king of Scotland as their governor as much as parts of Austria (which Swanson treats as one unit) did their king. The clan leaders often held land from the Scottish king as his vassals. In the second place, the Highlands cannot be said to have conducted a foreign policy separate from the rest of Scotland; revolts against increasing authority from the government cannot really be regarded as acts of foreign policy. In the third place, there was a great similarity between the clans in the Highlands and those in the Lowlands—even contemporaries thought so and made no distinction except to regard the highlanders as more warlike. T. C. Smout wrote: ‘The differences in social structure between agrarian society in the Highlands and Lowlands were therefore mainly one of emphasis—Highland society was based on kinship modified by feudalism, Lowland society on feudalism tempered by kinship’ (Smout, T. C., A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1630. New York, 1969, p. 47). Therefore, it would seem much more in keeping with the faets to treat Scotland as one unit, a centralist regime in the beginning which became a balanced regime in the course of becoming Presbyterian in religion.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Swanson, , pp. 121, 235–7.Google Scholar

²⁰ See Smith, A. H., ‘The Elizabethan Gentry of Norfolk: Office Holding and Faction’, University of London Ph.D. Thesis (1959), p. 6. One-third of the justices in Norfolk were not included in any of the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century visitation returns of the College of Harolds.Google Scholar

²¹ An excellent example of these procedures can be found in the West Riding of Yorkshire. In the 1590s Sir John Savile and others as justices of the peace represented the interests of the West Riding clothiers when they resisted the royal command to collect money in that region to help Hull pay its ship money. The justices were summoned to London and subsequently Savile was dropped from the commission. See François, Martha Ellis, ‘The Social and Economic Development of Halifax, 1558–1640’, in the Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section, vol. XI, Part VIII, p. 230Google Scholar. See also Smith, op. cit., for some examples from Norfolk.

²² Swanson, , p. 8.Google Scholar

²³ Swanson, , p. 13.Google Scholar

²⁴ Ibid., p. 14. Swanson stated that in Lutheranism ‘all believers are equally priests' (ibid., p. 13). That was true in the 1520s, but Luther came to a narrower viewpoint of the clergy after he saw that that doctrine led to chaos in the Church.

²⁵ Swanson, , p. 16.Google Scholar

²⁶ It seems a little strange that Swanson used the Thirty-nine Articles of 1563 to describe Anglicanism when he placed the final Reformation settlement in England in the reign of Edward VI (ibid., pp. 17, 240). Actually in that reign the English Church was closer to Calvinism than it was by 1563.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 13.

²⁸ Swanson, , p. 15.Google Scholar

²⁹ Ibid., p. 25.

³⁰ Pruett, Gordon, ‘Thomas Cranmer and the Eucharistic Controversy’, Princeton Ph.D. Thesis (1968), p. 396.Google Scholar

³¹ See Mueller, William A., Church and Stale in Luther and Calvin (New York, 1965), passim; and Pruett, passim.Google Scholar

³² The idea of objective and subjective immanence came from Gordon Pruett and more particularly from his Ph.D. thesis. The word ‘subjective' unfortunately has derogatory connotations in everyday speech, but no better word seems available in the present context to reveal the distinction between the two kinds of immanence.

³³ Swanson, , p. 34.Google Scholar