Readers, Texts and Compilers in the Earlier Middle Ages: Studies in Medieval Canon Law in Honour of Linda Fowler-Magerl (review)

Dr Linda Fowler-Magerl, the honorand of this volume, has reinvigorated the study of pre-Gratian medieval canon law in a manner similar to Anders Winroth’s path-breaking findings on the authorship of the Decretum of ‘Gratian’. Fowler-Magerl’s work on judicial procedure literature, sources, and transmission of pre-Gratian canonical collections (most notably in her 1998 Kanones CD-ROM database), and the compilation, acquisition, and transmission of such texts is obligatory reading for any serious incursion into these fields. The twelve contributors to this volume, among the foremost established and emerging scholars in the field of medieval canon law, have appropriately honoured their dedicatee in the level of scholarship and insight that pervades this festschrift.

Roger Reynolds’s chapter considers the inclusion of the Notitia Galliarum, a popular and widely disseminated text compiled in the late fourth or early fifth century, in a Salzburg liturgico-canonical collection of the ninth century. Noteworthy for Reynolds is the modification of the text of the Notitia in this latter collection to reflect a preoccupation with changing ecclesiological and political circumstances in Gaul. Implicit also is the significant interrelationship between canonical and liturgical collections of this early medieval period.

Abigail Firey draws on her recent monograph (A Contrite Heart, Leiden, 2009) to posit a relationship of a different sort, between penitential theology and jurisprudence. Firey analyses the influence of Christian thought on law in the late eighth- and early ninth-century Carolingian period. It is Firey’s contention that jurists’ awareness of innocence and guilt as a matter buried invisibly in the human heart resulted in the ‘domain of penitential activity’ being brought ‘ever nearer to the domain of judicial activity’ (p. 29), especially in a time that coincided with Carolingian imperial expansion and the ongoing threat of counter-insurgency.

Greta Austin compares two of the most important canonical collections of the eleventh century, the Decretum of Burchard of Worms and Ivo of Chartres’s Decretum, on the issue of ‘authority’, specifically what makes law binding. Austin’s important study challenges traditional orthodoxies of the eleventh-century ‘Gregorian reform movement’ as privileging church over secular authority, since neither canonist ‘looked to the Roman Church as definitively shaping orthodoxy’ (p. 57). Her observations are noteworthy in the broader sweep of legal history, since one of the ‘hallmarks of the Western legal interpretation is this concern for authority’ (p. 58). Christof Rolker also challenges such accepted views of the Gregorian reform, disputing the claim that the Collection in Seventy-Four Titles of the late eleventh century was the ‘first manual of [Gregorian] reform’ (p. 59). Rather, Rolker argues, that collection was consistent with a ‘monastic reform’ agenda.

Several contributions point to the dangers of ignoring interstitial sources that defy strict categorization. Kathleen Cushing’s chapter on the phenomenon of the ‘intermediate collection’, that is non-extant compilations ‘whose existence can be posited as a link between other collections’ (p. 73), offers a re-assessment of one such collection: the so-called Collectio canonum Barberiniana of the early eleventh century. For Cushing, the study of the transmission and use of that text ‘offers a window’ (p. 81) on canonistic activity in central Italy in the early twelfth century.

Uta-Renate Blumenthal examines another intermediate source, the Liber Terraconensis of the late eleventh century, to consider whether a ‘friendship network’ existed in the regions surrounding Poitiers and Bordeaux in the same way that Ian Robinson had observed in south Germany. She finds similar reformist tendencies, and hence support for Pope Gregory VII, in both regions.

Martin Brett analyses ‘additions’, namely ‘external interpolations, supplementary texts’ (p. 137), that were added to manuscripts containing the works attributed to Ivo of Chartres. Brett’s survey indicates, among other...