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253 Charles Donahue Jr. 17 Thoughts on Diocesan Statutes England and France, 1200–1500 As is well known, local councils and synods proliferated in the thirteenth century. They generated, among other things, a large body of conciliar canons and synodal statutes, some of which have been given modern editions.1 The recent general history of medieval canon law in the classical period, however, does not deal with them.2 I have neither the space nor the competence to offer a general account here. What I would like to do, however, is to take one particular form of synodal statute, sometimes called the liber synodalis, make some suggestions as to what became of that form in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and offer some examples of how conciliar canons and synodal statutes were used in the later Middle Ages. It seemed fitting to dedicate the effort to a scholar who has done so much to enhance our understanding of councils in a slightly earlier period and who was a fellow member of Stephan Kuttner’s seminar at Yale in 1964–65. On 16 April 1287, Peter Quinil, bishop of Exeter, held a diocesan synod, which promulgated fifty-six statutes, to which was attached a summula, a sort of ‘Reader’s Digest’ version of a manual for confessors.3 The statutes, 1. E.g., Councils and Synods II: A.D. 1205–1313, ed. F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney, 2 vols. (Oxford 1964); Les statuts synodaux français du xiiie siècle, ed. Odette Pontal and Joseph Avril, 5 vols. (Paris 1983–2001); Synodicon hispanum, gen. ed. Antonio García y García, 8 vols. (Madrid 1981–2007); Concilia Poloniae; źródła i studia krytyczne, ed. Jakub Sawicki, 12 vols. to date (Warsaw 1945– ). 2. The History of Medieval Canon Law in the Classical Period, 1140–1234: From Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX, ed. Wilfried Hartmann and Kenneth Pennington (Washington, DC 2008). 3. Councils and Synods II, 2.982–1077. For Quinil (also, and apparently mistakenly, referred to as ‘Quivil’), see most recently N. Orme, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB] (Oxford 2004), s.n. In common with the modern literature, I refer to gatherings of the clergy at the diocesan level as ‘synods’ and those at the provincial and higher levels as ‘councils’ . The ‘legislative’ 254  Charles Donahue Jr. now known as ‘Exeter II’ , are quite elaborate, occupying seventy-eight pages in the modern edition, with the summula giving us twenty-three more. There is little in the statutes that is new as a matter of substance, though the rhetoric is more elaborate than most. The contents of the statutes have much in common with other thirteenth-century statutes in the western part of England, and they belong to a family of statutes that Professor Cheney has shown are derived from Worcester III (1240). The more immediate ancestor of the 1287 statutes seems to have been statutes promulgated for the diocese of Wells probably around 1258. The author of the 1287 statutes, perhaps Quinil himself, seems also to have used Winchester III (1262 X 1265), another member of the family, and other English statutes and canons that are outside of the family.4 His rewriting, however, was quite comprehensive. In marked contrast to other English synodal statutes of this period, there are relatively few verbal borrowings from other statutes and canons. Exeter II is quite well organized. This is not the case with many synodal statutes and conciliar canons of the period, even those promulgated at the highest level (e.g., Lateran IV). The surviving manuscripts of Exeter II all have rubrics, and it seems clear that the rubrics go back the original exemplar. Not only that, but Exeter II, its ancestor Wells, and its sibling or cousin Winchester III all show a distinct form of organization of the individual statutes into a coherent whole.5 This form of organization can be seen most clearly if we organize the rubrics of Exeter II into tabular form and assign to each group of statutes a general title (which, admittedly, is in most cases not there): De sacramentis cc. 1–8 De ecclesiis cc. 9–16 De clericis cc. 17–30 De iudiciis cc. 31–46 Miscellanea cc. 47–56 products of the former are ‘statutes’ , of the latter are ‘canons’ , though it is not clear that these distinctions were observed by contemporaries. I have also tried to finesse the question whether these legislative products are to...

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