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  • New Evidence for the Canons of the First Lateran Council
  • Louis I. Hamilton and Martin Brett

The manuscript and its context

The tradition of the canons of the Lateran Council (1123) has not been established despite its profound significance. I.S. Robinson has rightly described the Council as ‘the last occasion when the characteristic Gregorian reform programme dominated conciliar legislation’.1 In part two of this article, Martin Brett explains in detail the difficulties in establishing such a tradition and the limits of the standard edition available in the Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta.2 In this first part, I shall introduce new evidence for the canons found in Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Santa Croce Plut. 9.dex.1, a copy of the Expositio in Pentateuchum by Bruno of Segni, who died on July 18 1123, three months after the conclusion of the council, which he may have attended.3 Since it is complete and one of the earliest extant copies, it is a significant exemplar of Bruno’s commentary. The twelfth-century manuscript had been owned by Santa Croce, but was removed to the Laurenziana in 1766 by an act of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Pietro Leopoldo (1747-†1792), in which he dissolved the venerable Franciscan library.4 It is comprised of 170 folios and is 190 × 280mm. The [End Page 1] catalog of 1777 describes the codex as twelfth century and as containing ‘in between pages 75b and 76 in the same antique hand as above’ some ‘ecclesiastical sanctions’.5 The online catalog lists the manuscript as dated between 1100-1110, a very precise date for which I have found no support.6 This dating is certainly incorrect as the materials at folios 75v and 76r are, indeed, ‘ecclesiastical sanctions’, and more precisely are canons produced in 1123 at the First Lateran Council.7 Therefore the manuscript must be later than April of 1123. If the proper postquem is 1123, then the ante-quem may be 1136 when the most obvious source for or recipient of the canons, the bishop of Florence, Goffredo (1113-1136, † 1142), was forced into exile. That presumes the manuscript is Florentine in its origin and was not brought to Florence from elsewhere in Italy by the Franciscans of Santa Croce. At present there is no way to say this definitively.

The manuscript is made up of quires of irregular numbers of folios although no material is missing from the text.8 The tenth [End Page 2] quire is a quaterno, the last folios of which contain the canons at 75v and 76r.9 The text of the commentary at 75r ends a little more than two-thirds down the folio with room for an additional twelve lines of text. The catchwords, ‘et nisi his’, at the lower right of 75r correspond to the incipit of 77r. At the lower left (interior gutter) is the word ‘explicit’, perhaps intended to signal the intentional point of the break in the commentary. The canons are copied (without a ‘proemium’) beginning at the top of 75v, commencing with the first canon of the COD edition. The canons continue at the top of 76r with canons 10b, 12, and 11. The remaining three quarters of the folio is cut away and 76r is left as a stub. This could allow folio 76 to serve as a kind of bookmark for the reader to find these canons easily, as it did in my experience with the manuscript. 76v is intentionally left blank. At 77r Bruno’s commentary continues without any lost text (with ‘et nisi his’) in the same hand that had been copying the previous material. In the estimation of the eighteenth-century catalog, the same hand copied out the canons. The change in format of the canons makes it difficult to say with certainty.

The Laurenziana manuscript represents a unique tradition of the canons of the Lateran Council of 1123, a fact that has not been previously appreciated.10 It is decidedly shorter than the ‘alpha’ or ‘beta’ traditions of the COD and represents the second shortest version of the canons presently known. Only Bibliothèque nationale de France lat. 152, fol. 44, with which it shares the...

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