The Apostolic Penitentiary in Local Contexts

Canon Law in Norway Illustrated by the Penitentiary Texts: An Example of a European Centre–Periphery Perspective

CANON LAW IN NORWAY ILLUSTRATED BY THE PENITENTIARY TEXTS: AN EXAMPLE OF A EUROPEAN CENTRE–PERIPHERY PERSPECTIVE Torstein Jørgensen INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS The preserved text material from the protocols of the Apostolic Penitentiary Office is a rather late phenomenon as seen from a medievalist’s point of view. The section of these holdings normally referred to as the antique text collection, containing the supplications predating the Council of Trent, consists of some few scattered volumes from the first half of the fifteenth century, followed by a series of more regular registrations appearing from around 1450 onwards. However, if turning to the substance matters dealt with in the texts, these are by no means a novelty of the fifteenth century. In fact, the actual contents set down in what came to be the ‘reserved cases’ treated by the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Apostolic Penitentiary, were the result of a long historical process. In the period between the little Renaissance of the twelfth and the great Renaissance of the fifteenth century, the theological, societal and institutional brickwork necessary for the formalised procedures functioning at the time of the Penitentiary in its high peak epoch1 gradually fell into place. In this article we will cast a glance at the two main arenas that formed the historical backdrop for the late medieval activity related to the Papal Penitentiary. On the one hand, we will turn our attention to some main lines in the development of the theology and ideology inside the walls of the Roman Church with a special view to the formation of canon law. On the other hand, we will look at the process of the development of local conditions in partibus – in our case the vast but sparsely populated lands of the Norwegian church province of Nidaros – which partly lived their own separate life 1 From the pontificate of Nicolas V (1447–1455) to the Council of Trent (1545–1563). CANON LAW IN NORWAY 20 and partly were shaped by influence from the bigger world, including the Church. What is of particular interest here is the actual interplay between the two, which forms the immediate explicatory background against which the actual texts of the penitentiary petitions were set. Or put in other words, the texts we have in front of us in the penitentiary protocols are on the one hand the direct products of the theologically based judicial system shaped in the Church from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and a reflection of the actual state of affairs in the local communities of Western Christendom on the other. The fact that we can observe a high degree of similarity among the texts regardless of their geographical provenance shows that the penitentiary ideology and procedures were something that permeated Western Europe as a whole. But the also easily observable fact that there are variations in the texts from region to region with respect to numbers, frequency, proportions of petitions between the different categories as well as a total lack of certain types of petitions from certain regions2 is a strong pointer that distinctively local conditions also played their part. Finally, we will, on the basis of our findings on the interrelation between canon and national legislation in Norway, make use of the supplicatory material from the Penitentiary to give some examples on how these matters also put their mark on the lives of Norwegian fifteenth century individuals. SOME OF THE MAIN LINES OF THE CODIFICATION OF A CANON LAW CORPUS AND THE NORWEGIAN PROCESS OF LAW FORMATION The historical period when ecclesiastical law turned from a state of scattered and nonsystematised sources, such as bullas, decrees and treatises mostly dealt with by unauthorised law schools,3 into a unified corpus4 coincides well with the period when the old Norwegian provincial laws found their way into writing and into the codification of a Land Law (Landslov), that is, a law in force in the entire realm.5 The epoch-making event in this process on the supranational ecclesiastical level was, of course, the twelfth century compilation of Decretum Gratianum followed by the additions of the subsequent 2 See, for instance, the overrepresentation of matrimonial cases from Dubrovnik: Ana Marinković, “Social and Territorial Endogamy in the Ragusan Republic: Matrimonial Dispenses during the Pontificates of Paul II and Sixtus IV (1464–1495),” in The Long Arm of Papal Authority: Late Medieval Christian Peripheries and their Communication with the Holy See, ed. Gerhard Jaritz, Torstein Jørgensen, and Kirsi Salonen, 2nd ed. (Budapest: CEU...