The History of Medieval Canon Law in the Classical Period, 1140–1234: From Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX (review)

This is the third volume published of a planned multivolume survey of the history of medieval canon law. In a time when the history of law has entered the mainstream of medieval studies, the need for such a work is obvious. Here, the student may approach canon law during its so-called classical period, 1140-1234, through a series of nontechnical chapters in English written by outstanding experts. In the Middle Ages, law was already a highly technical subject (as Michael H. Hoeflich and Jasonne M. Grabher eloquently clarify in the first chapter), and much modern scholarship on medieval law is also technical in form and published in many languages. It is a pleasure to see the great scholar Rudolf Weigand summarize a lifetime of arduous work on the glosses on Gratian's Decretumin a mere forty-three pages and in English. This is otherwise available only in German in his Die Glossen zum Dekret Gratians(Rome, 1991)—two hefty volumes that are not reading for the faint of heart.

Other chapters bring together knowledge that one otherwise has to hunt down in many places. The articles on decretal collections by Charles Duggan and Kenneth Pennington are masterful examples of this. The authors manage to explain clearly and succinctly the insanely complicated history of these texts.

Every chapter is worth reading, as each is brimming with new insights. The period addressed is an important one, with many innovations in law, especially under the double influence of the newly discovered Roman law of Justinian and Gratian's great compilation of canon law. The impulse came foremost from the law schools, where law was collected, studied, and interpreted. Chapters by Peter Landau, James A. Brundage, Wolfgang P. Müller, Pennington, Weigand, and Duggan deal with different groups of legal scholars (decretists and decretalists), most of whom were active as teachers. Their teaching inspired innovations in legislation, which in turn inspired more teaching. Anne J. Duggan and Antonio García y García examine the four Lateran Councils convoked between 1123 and 1215, the greatest ecclesiastical legislative assemblies of the period. The final chapter, by Joseph Goering, deals with the aspect of canon law that most affected the daily life of ordinary people: the law of penance and the confessional.

Four of the contributions have been translated from German and Spanish. The translations are generally exact but could have used more polishing, since many infelicities remain in the printed text. Occasional sentences read like early drafts, for example: "Moreover there are glosses attributed to Vincentius that then continue on after his siglum for several lines, indicating a hand distinct from that of Vincentius, completing or shaping his thought" (p. 375). For anyone familiar with the writing of historians of canon law, this is easy enough to parse, but neophytes will find sentences like these difficult.

The volume suffers one serious drawback: It has been in preparation for a very long time. Two of the authors, Weigand (1929–98) and Duggan (1921–99) are, regrettably, long deceased, and most of the other contributions were also written at least a decade ago. Research on Gratian's Decretum, in particular, has been very intense in the intervening years. Despite some sentences and footnotes that have clearly been added after the articles were finished, the treatment of this important text remains several years out of date. Still, the volume is very welcome indeed, as it makes the field eminently more accessible to newcomers while offering much to experts.