Reading the Church: William Durandus and a New Approach to the History of Ecclesiology

Abstract In the study of ecclesiology it is often said that the first treatises on the Church were written during the controversies around the bull Unam sanctam (1302) of Pope Boniface VIII. These works and their successors provide a political and institutional ecclesiology determined by the author's attitude to the papal claims. Before the bull, however, a friend of Boniface, William Durandus of Mende, wrote a commentary on the liturgy that summarised a very different ecclesiology which has its