Gratian: The Treatise on Laws (Decretum DD. 1-20) translated by Augustine Thompson, O.P., with the Ordinary Gloss (translated by James Gordley) (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 427 or to Lot or Daniel (see below), a less partisan reading would also consider the possibility that the knight's charge might have had a heterosexual basis. Walter Daniel's own word for "wantonness" which he uses in the Epístola ad Mauricium is the less ambiguous lasciuiam. In short, the anecdote is complex, and richly allusive; our interpretation must account for that complexity . As I indicated, Walter referred to Aelred as our Joseph. The reference to the scriptural figure could not be more bold. McGuire never mentions its presence. Yet it was a scriptural figure favored by Aelred, who used it more than sixty times in his work. Walter actually mentions three biblical figures, Joseph, Lot, and Daniel, at the conclusion of the anecdote of the abusive knight. They were traditional topoi of the virtuous exile. McGuire never mentions them; what they might mean; how they might structure the argument of the anecdote; how they might figure in how Aelred's colleagues understood the accusation of the intemperate knight; nor what Walter Daniel intended diem to symbolize? Might they even illuminate some sexual innuendo? The stories ofJoseph and Lot do contain significant sexual anecdotes. But Joseph and Lot are involved with the opposite sex. In this same anecdote, Walter uses a simile, likening Aelred to a great tree which brought forth perfect fruit "que tantum postmodum fructum fecit in consummacione," a metaphor we find in the "Book of Daniel." Perhaps it is just a coincidence that the first meaning of luxuriant in the Oxford Latin Dictionary concerns the fructification of plants. Although aware of Walter's rhetorical penchant, McGuire never mentions any of these figures. His inattention to such narrative details mars his interesting comments, since these were details inescapable to a twelfth-century monastic audience. McGuire's reading in Aelred is broad and his is a genuine sympathy and admiration for Aelred. Yet I find some of his interpretations limited by his insistence that the text prove his hypotheses. McGuire's passion for his subject, the seriousness with which he applies Aelred's message, and his intimacy with the works are laudable. However, his analysis often turns Aelred into a late twentieth-century Christian monastic, and less the spiritual leader of an isolated , hardy group of twelfth-century Yorkshire Cistercians. The language of twelfth-century Cistercian spirituality is richly polysemous. We cannot pay too much attention to the ipsa verba McGuire's thoughtful study would have been even more informed and informative, ifhe had read the Aelredian corpus with greater attention to the historical nuances of that prose. Thomas J. Heffernan University of Tennessee Gratian: The Treatise on Laws (Décrétant DD. 1-20) translated by Augustine Thompson, O.P., with the Ordinary Gloss (translated by James Gordley). With an introduction by Katherine Christensen. [Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Canon Law, Volume 2.] (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic 428 BOOK REVIEWS University of America Press. 1993. Pp. xxviii, 131. «24.95 cloth; $14.95 paper.) Gratian's Concordance ofDiscordant Canons, later the Decreta, still later the Decretum, is the most important single work to come out of an extraordinary revival of legal learning that centered around Bologna in the twelfth century. Completed around the year 1140, the work was quickly adopted as a basic textbook for students of canon law. It was read and glossed throughout the Middle Ages. In the early modern period it became the first and largest part of the CorpusJuris Canonici The book played a role in the development of western legal science rivaled only by the Digest ofJustinian, and it stands with the Digest, the Bible, and (somewhat curiously) Peter Lombard's Sentences among die great teaching books of the West. Considering the importance of Gratian, it is to the enduring shame of the English-speaking world that no edition of his book exists in English. The need for such an edition has been increasingly recognized among those who are teaching students with little or no Latin, but the problem is more serious than that. Even those with quite a bit of Latin find Gratian hard going. The work is a compilation of diverse texts from every Christian...