The Collectio Burdegalensis: A Study and Register of an Eleventh-Century Canon Law Collection by Kriston R. Rennie (review)

Whereas most historians of medieval history make ample use of normative sources (including famous ones like the Dictatus Papae of Gregory VII, for example), the study of legal culture is often left to specialists. It is therefore particularly welcome that Kriston Rennie—an expert on medieval canon law—has published a book on the subject that is clearly not written only for specialists. Rennie presents and analyzes the so-called Collectio Burdegalensis (=CB), a substantial collection of canon law of the late-eleventh century, compiled (as Rennie argues) for La Sauve Majeure, a monastery some twenty kilometers east of the medieval city of Bordeaux.

In his introduction, Rennie sketches the church reform movement of the eleventh century as the background of collections like CB. He also gives a careful and balanced account of the scholarly literature on the collection itself and makes clear that CB should not, as has often been the case, seen as a product of a “Poitevin” law school. Rather, CB was a local collection in the sense that the compiler adapted widely spread collections of canon law to local needs and more specifically to the needs of a large monastery. That said, the collection does contain Poitevin material—namely the canons of the important Council of Poitiers held in 1078. (Oddly, this very council is missing in the register for the attribution of canons in the collection found on pp. 240–43.) Indeed, Rennie highlights the importance of this council and those held at Bordeaux in 1079 and 1080 for CB, and goes on to suggest that the 1080 council was in fact held at La Sauve Majeure itself (p. 19). To convince a skeptic, more arguments would have been needed here, including perhaps a discussion of the foundation date for La Sauve Majeure. Yet even a skeptic can agree with Rennie that the collection was compiled after 1080 and specifically for a monastery, possibly La Sauve Majeure.

The main part of the book is the analysis. As the specialist will see immediately (and as Rennie, of course, makes clear), it is based on Linda Fowler-Magerl’s database Clavis canonum, one of the most important tools in medieval canon law history. Rennie’s analysis of CB is yet another proof of how much can be gained from this invaluable database (http://www.mgh.de/ext/clavis/). Rennie’s canon-to-canon analysis provides basic information for those canons that can be traced back with certainty to well-known formal sources and gives fuller details for those texts for which this is not possible. The analysis is sound, but the choice of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century editions for almost all texts quoted is not convincing. For example, it is not clear why the canons of the Council of Poitiers (pp. 12–14) are quoted from the Mansi edition rather than CB with which Rennie was working. Likewise, for Burchard of Worms the editio princeps (also available online) clearly is to be preferred over the Migne edition.

Yet on the whole, the analysis is sound, and in the absence of an edition, Rennie’s “register” is simply the best way to read the collection; together with the useful introduction, it makes CB much more available to scholarship than it ever was.