Shaping Church Law around the Year 1000: The Decretum of Burchard of Worms (review)

This book presents a fundamental reinterpretation of an important collection of church law from the 1010s: the Decretum of Burchard, bishop of Worms. Like most canon law collections before the Decretum of Gratian (c. 1140), Burchard's book contains the text of many laws but no commentary in the compiler's own voice. Modern scholars have thus understood it as a simple storehouse of texts with a point of view, to be sure, but not much in the way of an argument. At the same time, they have been puzzled by Burchard's willingness to falsify his texts by changing their wording or attribution.

Greta Austin is now able to show that such views are overly simplistic. Burchard conscientiously produced a coherent and well-organized work—"the ideal book of canon law"—that presents his vision of justice in the Church. His voice may not be heard in the Decretum (except in the prologue), but Austin has found Burchard's hand in the many small adjustments he made to his texts. She shows that Burchard avoided contradictions among his canons either by selecting from his sources only canons that did not contradict each other or changing the wording of those that did. In doing so, Burchard did not act willfully, but he followed certain principles that were based in readings of the Bible offered by the Fathers. He also took care to quote texts that clearly express those principles. He changed the attributions of some of his texts so that they seemed to have been written by one of the approved authorities that he had listed in his prologue. The end result was a law book that was coherent, lucid, and easy to use. Thus he fulfilled what he had promised in the prologue: to produce a work that included only authoritative and harmonious canons that could be used also by priests without legal training and as a schoolbook. The general principles of law were so clear that the reader could easily extend them to cases not foreseen by any chapter in the Decretum.

Austin's results are remarkable. She achieves them through careful close readings and a painstakingly acquired, deep understanding of Burchard's work. Earlier scholars thought that it was possible to produce a unified and coherent work of canon law only after scholastic methods developed in the twelfth century. Those methods produced works like Gratian's Decretum, in which the author reconciled contradictory legal statements by discussing and explaining them in his own voice. Burchard did not include a running commentary in his Decretum, which, however, does not make it an unreflective conglomeration of texts. He strove for and achieved results that would be similar (and perhaps in many ways superior) to Gratian's, but he used different methods—namely, those in vogue among Carolingian intellectuals. Burchard's editorial interventions played the same role as scholastic commentary in later legal works. The great merit of Austin's work is that she understands Burchard according to the standards he set for himself, not according to those current in a different century.

As a consequence, legal and intellectual historians need to rethink how jurisprudential thought developed in and around the eleventh century. The "Gregorian" reform movement no longer appears as the watershed moment it usually is taken to be.