Rotuli Parisienses: Supplications to the Pope from the University of Paris (review)

Medieval universities, especially those with dominant theological and arts faculties like Paris, depended in their material existence on the prebendal provision, which their members petitioned from the Church. In the fourteenth century, papal support by the assignment of prebends was given a fixed institutional form by the rotuli or rolls of petitions for benefices, which were compiled periodically by the universities. Besides the University of Bologna, the center of law studies, the University of Paris was the oldest and most famous up until the end of the Middle Ages; both had the widest geographical influence and the largest teaching staff, but Paris had the most clerics who drew their income from church prebends. Therefore, scrolls of supplication, which were submitted to the Pope in the hope of being provided with benefices, were crucial for Paris as a main instrument of medieval "fund-raising"—crucial as well for the historian as sources of highest and most manifold quality. William J. Courtenay, the well-known scholar of medieval intellectual history, realized (by private initiative!) within a six-year period a masterpiece, which is essential not only for the history of the University of Paris. For these rotuli, or benefice supplications, provide the names of active and recent Parisian regent masters which are, or now can better be said to have been mostly unknown to us due to the absence of matriculation records in the fourteenth century. Denifle as editor of the fundamental Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis knew the few (five not extant or original) general supplications for the University of Paris that survived in the papal Registers of Supplications; he edited them, however, in a very restricted form. Furthermore, one has to recognize that these rotuli "represent only a portion of what once existed." Surely, the greatest (and not to undervalue) work and merit of Courtenay consists in the recovery and edition of hundreds of lost Parisian supplications out of thousands of entries in the papal registers. In his introduction Courtenay explains precisely the method (and limits) of reconstructing a large part of the missing university rotuli and of the corresponding provisions, offers a short history of the rotuli—and gives, by the way, an excellent introduction to the papal chancery of Avignon.

The value of this edition does not lie only in the presentation of the rotuli as one of "the most important prosopographical sources for universities in the second half of the fourteenth century," so that it "represents the largest body of new documentation for the pre-fifteenth-century University to appear since the publication of the Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis." It offers us in addition more aspects of possible further research: For example, questions of the social history of the University of Paris—many Parisian masters were involved in service outside the university—or the history of the papacy and the relationships between universities and papal court in general, more specific for instance the importance of the papacy for the Parisian masters as well as aspects of astonishing individual patterns of the popes in "signing" the petitions. Innocent VI, for example, the graduate of the law school of Toulouse, seems to have favored Parisian masters who had studied law—a remarkable observation, because it challenges the common opinion that mere formal reasons influenced the "signing" of petitions. Not least, therefore, during the pontificate of Innocent VI the affirming of rotuli from the University of Paris was strictly limited, and so Courtenay decided to present (in Appendix II of Volume II) for this pontificate provisions for Parisian masters resulting from independent or individual supplications, which were generally not included in the edition, but indicated in the footnotes, where as well additional biographical information is given. Much work and energy have also been invested...