This essay establishes the significance of the concept of “discretion” to the scope and nature of episcopal power in the early Stuart Church. Examples are drawn from the Church’s constitutional documents and the ecclesiology of Richard Hooker, where “discretion” named a faculty of judgment and the particularly controversial form of autonomous power over adiaphora, or “things indifferent,” proper to the clergy. Turning to the manuscript and print records of a dispute between Bishop of Lincoln John Williams and the Archiepiscopal regime of William Laud, the essay argues that contrasting interpretations of discretion within the Church’s institutional culture characterized divergent approaches to conformity. These differences were established through the metaphors that translated between objects at the edges of episcopal jurisdictions and the concerns closest to the Church’s doctrinal identity. Disputes over these metaphors aggravated constitutional tensions in the years preceding the civil wars.

本文确立了“自由裁量”概念对早期斯图亚特教会的主教权力的范围和性质的重要性。例子来自教会的宪法文件和理查德·胡克（Richard Hooker）的教会学，其中“自由裁量权”（discretion）命名为一种判断能力，以及对反光辉的特别有争议的自治权形式，或“无动于衷”的形式，适用于神职人员。谈到林肯·约翰·威廉姆斯主教与威廉·劳德的大主教政权之间的纠纷的手稿和印刷记录，该论文认为，教会制度文化中对自由裁量权的不同解释具有不同的整合方法。这些差异是通过在主教辖区边缘的对象与最接近教会教义身份的关注之间翻译的隐喻建立的。内战之前的几年，关于这些隐喻的争论加剧了宪法上的紧张关系。