DOMONT
. The church of Sainte-Madeleine at Domont (Val d’Oise), a dependency of the Parisian
abbey of Saint-Martin-des-Champs after 1124, has a chevet that dates to 1150–55,
although the axial chapel was added later. The transept and nave were rebuilt in the early
16th century, and there were major repairs in the early 18th. Nonetheless, the three-story
interior elevation and the barely protruding flying buttresses on the south side (known
through prerestoration photographs) link the chevet to the Parisian Early Gothic milieu.
William W.Clark
Plagnieux, Philippe. “Les arcs-boutants du XIIe siècle de l’église de Domont.” Bulletin
monumental 150(1992): 209–22.
DONATION OF CONSTANTINE
. An 8th-century forgery that purports to establish the temporal authority of the papacy,
the Constitutum Constantini or Donation of Constantine is based on legends of Pope
Sylvester I that date from the 5th century, found in the Legenda sancti Silvestri. Although
attributed to the Roman emperor Constantine I, the Donation was probably the work of a
cleric of the church of the Savior (St. John Lateran). Divided into two parts and addressed
to Pope Sylvester, “Constantine” describes his conversion to Christianity in the
Confessio, and in the second part, the Donatio proper, he bestows on Sylvester and his
successors a power that matches his own royal authority. While the document outlines or
in a sense creates the temporal sovereignty of the pope, it implicitly undercuts this aim by
having the power of the papacy derive from the emperor. Because of this ambiguity, the
document has been used both to advance and to restrict the autonomy of papal rule. The
Donation was also instrumental in developing the thesis of inalienability: no ruler had the
right to give to others any of his essential governing powers or any of the lands in the
royal domain. In the 15th century, Nicholas of Cusa and Lorenzo della Valle determined
that the Donation of Constantine was not issued by Constantine, a revelation
subsequently used by Protestants to argue that papal power was based on falsehoods. The
oldest surviving copy of the Donation is the 8th-century manuscript B.N. lat. 2777.
E.Kay Harris
[See also: DONATION OF PEPIN]
Coleman, Christopher B., ed. and trans. The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of
Constantine: Text and Translation into English. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922.
Fuhrman, Horst, ed. Constitutum Constantini. Hanover: Hahn, 1968.
Ullmann, Walter. The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages. 3rd ed. London: Methuen,
1970, pp. 74–86.
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