Die Synoden und Konzilien in der Zeit des Reformpapsttums in Deutschland und Italien von Leo IX. bis Calixt II. 1049–1123 (review)

This is a big book with a big wingspan: It covers all the known papal church councils between 1049 and 1123, beginning with the traditional Easter synod held in Rome under Pope Leo IX to the Lenten synod of 1123, traditionally know as the First Lateran Council. Georg Gresser deflates the standing of this last synod with the comment, "the usually used terminology of this gathering, that in the literature is generally known as Lateran I, is only another Lenten Roman synod under the leadership of the pope" (p. 476). There is no question that the preservation and transmission of the canons of this council, together with the information we have about the summoning and course of the council, force us to conclude that this council should probably not be considered the first ecumenical Western Latin council. That honor should be given to the Roman council held in 1139. A crucial sign of the 1123 council's lack of importance is that its decisions were only slowly taken up in the canonical collections. Gratian's included only fourteen of the twenty-two canons into his Decretum, and his treatment of these conciliar canons is quite striking. He attributed none of them to the council. Instead, he inscribed them as being texts of Popes Urban II and Calixtus II. There could be good reasons for Gratian's attributions. Conciliar canons were repeated again and again in the eleventh and early-twelfth centuries; perhaps Gratian took his canons from other sources and never knew that they were also in the legislation of the 1123 Lenten Synod.

The book is not built upon the author's research but on that of dozens of others. Its strength is the gathering together of bibliographical materials on 145 synods. Evidence of the achievements of Uta-Renate Blumenthal and Robert Somerville inhabits many footnotes and a generous swath of Gresser's detailed bibliography. The book's weakness, like that of all Handbücher, is a fairly sparse interpretative framework. Larger questions go, for the most part, unanswered. There is much, however, that the diligent scholar can excavate from the book. In an appendix, Gresser has provided a useful table of synods (pp. 587–90), labeling them papal, legatine, royal, episcopal, and antipapal. The gradual disappearance of episcopal synods after 1049 is striking. There are thirteen between 1049 and 1098 (that number is slightly misleading because some are joint legatine and royal), and none after 1098.The easy and obvious explanation is that the reform papacy began to use the instrument of the council to carry out its agenda (a point that Blumenthal emphasized in her book on Gregory VII); that fact, however, does not explain how the papacy did it so quickly and effectively. After listing and examining individual synods in detail, Gresser has several concluding chapters on dates of the councils, council locations, council participants, synodal liturgical practices, and synodal decisions. He does not, in the end, provide a coherent "grand synthesis" about the role of councils in carrying out the agenda of reform popes. He does, however, provide much evidence upon which a grand synthesis could be built.

There is little on the incorporation of conciliar canons into eleventh- and twelfth-century collections of canon law; Gresser only notes in footnotes some of the canons with a future. The canonical tradition does, nonetheless, shed much light on the reception of conciliar canons. For example, Gresser observes that contemporaries were divided on the importance of the Roman Synod of 1078 that was held in the Lateran. Pope Gregory VII and the canonists were not. Gregory included a selection of the canons in his Register. It was not the only council of his pontificate that was enregistered; eight others were also included. Beyond the Register...