Sibert of Beek's Response to Marsilius of Padua

Abstract

The Carmelite theologian Sibert of Beek is remembered by modern historians for two very different works, an ordinal of Carmelite
liturgy published in 1312 and a polemic against Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis, written in 1327. The polemic, usually called the Reprobatio sex errorum, is brief compared with some papalist defenses of the mid-1320s, even modest efforts such as William of Cremona’s Reprobatio errorum and Alexander de Sancto Elpidio’s De ecclesiastica potestate. Consequently, Sibert’s work has been  examined infrequently by historians. Yet it deserves more attention than it has received. The Reprobatio sex errorum appeared at a  key point in early fourteenth-century controversies over papal power, and both its content and structure reveal an overlooked feature  of contemporary papalist political discourse.