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Chapter  Licit and Illicit in the Yarnall Collection at the University of Pennsylvania: Pages from the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX Robert Somerville By the early thirteenth century the Latin church possessed two collections of papal letters that were in some sense considered to be official. The compilation of letters of Pope Innocent III (–), prepared by Peter of Benevento in –, was endorsed by a papal bull from Innocent; the collection of Pope Honorius III’s (–) letters, assembled by the canonist Tancred in , was prefaced by a bull from Honorius. Both collections were responses to the flood of questions and litigation engulfing the courts of the church as the papacy struggled in the first part of the thirteenth century to define a centralized canon law for Latin Christendom. Throughout its long history the church ‘‘requires norms according to which it is defined and constituted, and procedures by which it operates,’’ and papal enactments are among the most important forms of law in the Western tradition.1 Decisions from the bishops of Rome were important even in pre-Constantinian times, and from the fourth century onward papal letters survive that present responses to questions that were posed from outlying areas. Such responses are called ‘‘decretals,’’ a word derived from the past participle of the verb decernere, meaning ‘‘to decide, to judge, or to decree.’’2 Despite their antiquity, it is especially from the mid-twelfth century that decretals play a leading and even a dominant role in medieval church law, and the specific types of letters that should be designated as decretals, and their scope, were questions debated by scholastic canonists. Peter of Benevento’s collection was, as far as is known, the first canon law book to be promulgated with a papal bull attached guaranteeing its authenticity . It can only be wondered that the papacy had not felt the need to take some such an authoritative step earlier. But exactly what Pope Inno-  Robert Somerville cent’s intention was in approving Peter’s work has been a matter of debate. The pope is not explicit about it, noting only that the texts of the collection were contained in the papal registers, and thus they could be used without any hesitation (about their authenticity, presumably) in judgments and in the schools. Honorius III, in contrast, offered details about the problems inherent in the burgeoning canon law of the early years of the thirteenth century and also showed an awareness of the need to come to grips with those problems. From the mid-twelfth century onward, with the appearance of Gratian’s Decretum and an increasing number of papal decisions that circulated throughout the church, new opportunities were at hand for the study and use of canon law. The result was an intensified interest in ecclesiastical law and the concomitant appearance of a number of new collections, especially of recent papal rulings. Not all churchmen of the time applauded those trends, and one late twelfth-century writer likened the growing volume of new law to an ‘‘unmanageable forest.’’3 In his bull authorizing Tancred’s collection, Pope Honorius III stated that new cases required new legal remedies, and his intention was to offer a book of papal laws that dealt with such emerging issues. Echoing Innocent III, Honorius went on to say that these decisions could be used without any doubt about their authenticity, but he then expanded on what he hoped to accomplish. These texts, he indicated, had been formally published, presumably by the prefatory bull, and Tancred was to make an effort to have other scholars use them in judgments and in the schools. The same covering letter was addressed to the masters at Padua, emphasizing Pope Honorius ’s intention to have the new compilation circulate.4 Leonard Boyle demonstrated that Tancred worked directly from Honorius III’s papal registers in preparing his compilation, as opposed to Peter of Benevento, who used earlier collections for texts of Innocent III’s enactments.5 The thirteenth-century papacy thus was increasingly active in both shaping and controlling the church’s law. Nonetheless, there simply was too much law bounding around in church courts, and the potential confusion within that law is exemplified by an anecdote concerning the early years of Gregory IX’s pontificate (– ). As the story goes, a decretal that could not be found in various earlier compilations, including the collections of Innocent III and Honorius III, was cited before the pope. Losing patience...

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