New Discourses In Medieval Canon Law Research

The contributions in New Discourses in Medieval Canon Law Research present new research on medieval church law, and propose a new model of how to write the history of canon law in the Middle Ages.

It is impossible to understand how the medieval church functioned and, in turn, influenced the lay world within its care without understanding "canon law". This book examines its development from its beginnings to the end of the Middle Ages, updating its findings in light of recent scholarly trends. This second edition has been fully revised and updated by Melodie H. Eichbauer to include additional material on the early Middle Ages; the significance of the discovery of earlier versions of Gratian’s Decretum; and the new research into law emanating from secular authorities, councils, episcopal acta, and juridical commentary to rethink our understanding of the sources of law and canon law's place in medieval society. Separate chapters examine canon law in intellectual spaces; the canonical courts and their procedures; and, using the case studies of deviation from orthodoxy and marriage, canon law in the lives of people. The main body of the book concludes with the influence of canon law in Western society, but has been reworked by integrating sections cut from the first edition chapters on canon law in private and public life to highlight the importance of this field of research. Throughout the work and found in the bibliography are references to current literature and resources in order to make researching in the field more accessible. The first appendix provides examples of how canonical texts are cited while the second offers biographical notes on canonists featured in the work. The end result is a second edition that is significantly rewritten and updated but retains the spirit of Brundage’s original text. Covering all aspects of medieval canon law and its influence on medieval politics, society, and culture, this book provides students of medieval history with an accessible overview of this foundational aspect of medieval history.

This monograph addresses the history of canon law in Western Europe between ca. 1000 and ca. 1150, specifically the collections compiled and the councils held in that time. The main part consists of an analysis of all major collections, taking into account their formal and material sources, the social and political context of their origin, the manuscript transmission, and their reception more generally. As most collections are not available in reliable editions, a considerable part of the discussion involves the analysis of medieval manuscripts. Specialized research is available for many but not all these works, but tends to be scattered across miscellaneous publications in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish; one purpose of the book is thus to provide relatively uniform, up-to-date accounts of all major collections of the period. At the same time, the book argues that the collections are much more directly influenced by the social milieux from which they emerged, and that more groups were involved in the development of high medieval canon law than it has previously been thought. In particular, the book seeks to replace the still widely held belief that the development of canon law in the century before Gratian's Decretum (ca. 1140) was largely driven by the Reform papacy. Instead, it is crucial to take into account the contribution of bishops, monks, and other groups with often conflicting interests. Put briefly, local needs and conflicts played a considerably more important role than central (papal) 'reform', on which older scholarship has largely focused.

This study reinterprets the relationship between the medieval papacy and independent states, suggesting that kings and governments were able to increase their effective power through close relationships with the international papacy, making the papacy integral to the creation of centralized national states and kingdoms in Europe.

This ground-breaking study explores welfare institutions in western law in the middle ages and establishes, for the first time, a legal model for the hospital. On Hospitals takes us beyond canon law, Carolingian capitularies, and Justinian's Code and Novels, to late Roman testamentary law, identifying new legislation and legal initiatives in every period. In challenging long established orthodoxies, a new history of the hospital emerges, one that is fundamentally a European history. To the history of law, it offers an unusual lens through which to explore canon law. What this monograph identifies for the first time is that the absence of law is the key. This is a study of what happened when there was no legal inheritance, nor even an authority through which to act. Here, at the fringes of law, pioneers worked, and forgers played. Their efforts shed light on councils, both familiar and forgotten, and on major figures, including Abbot Ansegis of Saint Wandrille, Abbot Wala of Corbie, the Pseudo-Isidorian forgers, Pope Alexander III, Bernard of Pavia, and Robert de Courson. Finally On Hospitals offers a new picture of welfare at the heart of Christianity. The place of welfare houses, at the edge of law, has for too long encouraged an assumption that welfare itself was peripheral to popes and canonists and so, by implication, to those who designed the priorities of the Church. This study reveals the central place for them all, across a thousand years, of Christian caritas. We discover a Christian foundation that could belong not to the Church, but to the whole society of the faithful.

This volume aims to revitalize the exchange between sociological differentiation theory and the sociology of religion, which previously held center stage among the sociological classics. It brings together contributions from different disciplines, as well as various forms of regional and historical expertise, which are indispensable in forming a globally oriented sociological perspective today. Secularization is understood as a process of boundary demarcation, that is, as the enactment of semantic, practical, and institutional distinctions between religion and other spheres of activity and knowledge. These distinctions may emerge from within the religious field itself, or may be absorbed into the field having originally emerged elsewhere. They may even be directly imposed upon religion by external forces. The volume is therefore based on the premise that societal differentiation – and secularity as a specific expression of it – is a widespread structural feature that nonetheless takes on various forms, depending on its historical and cultural context. In order to make this diversity visible, the volume adopts a global comparative perspective, and examines historical distinctions and differentiations in the West and beyond. By examining different forms and modes of secularity in statu nascendi, the volume contributes to developing a better understanding of the diversity of secularities, even of those found in the present day, in terms of their historicity and their specific path dependencies. With this shift in perspective, this special volume initiates a global and historical turn in the theory of differentiation, as well as in the study of secularity.

Gratian the Theologian shows how one of the best-known canonists of the medieval period was also an accomplished theologian. Well into the twelfth century, compilations of Church law often dealt with theological issues. Gratian's Concordia discordantium canonum or Decretum, which was originally compiled around 1140, was no exception, and so Wei claims in this provocative book. The Decretum is the fundamental canon law work of the twelfth century, which served as both the standard textbook of canon law in the medieval schools and an authoritative law book in ecclesiastical and secular courts. Yet theology features prominently throughout the Decretum, both for its own sake and for its connection to canon law and canonistic jurisprudence.

Constance of France: Womanhood and Agency in Twelfth-Century Europe is a biography of Constance of France, sister of King Louis VII of France. Myra Bom recovers Constance’s life story and puts it in its medieval context by examining the historical evidence of chronicles, charters, seal imprints and letters. The countess’s long and interesting life makes for women’s history with a large geographical scope, including France, England, Toulouse and the Latin East. It touches on many aspects of life during the Middle Ages such as birth, marriage and divorce, gender roles, experience of time, and expectation for the afterlife. Bom demonstrates how and to what extent medieval women could, and did, take control of their own lives. This book is an account of the interplay of historical context and agency.