ALMAIN, JACQUES. - French Gallican theologian, born in Sens around 1480, died in Paris in 1515. Initially a student and later a professor from 1512 at the Collège de Navarre in Paris, he gained his fame, which made him the "splendour of the academy," through the work he published in 1512 against the theories of Cardinal Gaetano de Vio. The latter had the previous year expounded the doctrine of the superiority of the Pope over the Council in his pamphlet *De comparatione auctoritatis Papae et Concilii* (Rome 1511), which had not met with the approval of Louis XII, then at odds with Julius II. The king asked the Sorbonne to refute the pamphlet, deemed insulting to the holy councils of the Church. The Sorbonne refused. The task of responding was then entrusted to Almain, who in his *Liber de auctoritate Ecclesiae et Conciliorum generalium adversus Thomam de Vio* (Paris 1512), argued that executive power indeed belongs to the Pope, but authority resides in the Church, that is, in the bishops and the faithful gathered in council; therefore, while the Pope is superior to individual bishops and the faithful, he is subject to the universal Church, as a part is to the whole; and the general council, which alone is infallible, is superior to the Pope, who can be judged and deposed by II. He had occasion to return to the same topic in refutation of a pamphlet by William of Ockham, with an *Expositio circa decisiones Magistri G. Occami* (Paris 1518), where he maintains that the authority of the prince derives neither from God nor from the Pope, but from the people, who first choose a leader, and God approves him; and he reaffirms the superiority of the council over the Pope.
Almain’s theories were refuted by Cardinal Gaetano in two *Apologiae* (Rome 1512) and by Cardinal Bellarmine both in the *Controversiae* and in *De Conciliis et Ecclesia*; yet they were unfortunately also cited, as classical authorities on the subject, alongside Gerson, Peter d’Ailly, and John Major, by Bossuet, Fénelon, and Febronius in defense of Gallicanism.
Other works by Almain include: *Moralia*, on certain points of general morality (Paris 1510); *In tertium sententiarum utilis editio*, published posthumously *cura Nicolai Mallarii* (Paris 1516).