Canon Law, Religion and Politics: Liber Amicorum Robert Somerville ed. by Uta-Renate Blumenthal, Anders Winroth, and Peter Landau (review)

In this Festschrift for Robert Somerville, Professor of History and Ada Byron Bampton Tremaine Professor of Religion at Columbia, top scholars in medieval canon law and Somerville's students have contributed essays divided into three sections, the first on canon law (essays by Greta Austin, Uta-Renate Blumenthal, Kathleen G. Cushing, Herbert Schneider, Franck Roumy, Roger E. Reynolds, Bruce C. Brasington, Anna Trumbore Jones, and Peter Landau), the second on religion, in particular Eucharistic controversies (Charles R. Shrader and Martin Brett), and the third on politics (Alison I. Beach, Detlev Jasper, Edward Peters, Giles Constable, Kenneth Pennington, Charles Donahue Jr., James A. Brundage, and Elizabeth Makowski).

As fitting in honor of Somerville, the first seven essays are very text- and manuscript-based. All are of good quality, but Blumenthal's essay shines. She demonstrates an astonishing grasp of the textual content and history of the Collectio canonum Caesaraugustana together with other, related collections and Roman law. Most of these essays will interest only specialists in pre-Gratian canon law. Cushing's, however, offers something broader. She contemplates why monks copied legal texts and asks what role eleventh-century Italian monks might have played in the administration of penance. She also emphasizes "the ongoing, and undoubtedly changing, reception of any canonical collection" (37), touching on a recurring theme throughout the volume, namely the importance of considering local circumstances.

Trumbore Jones emphasizes that theme in a study of monastic privileges in Aquitaine, discussing how and why tenth-century bishops sometimes advocated for monasteries' libertas within their dioceses. Beach maintains the "local" theme with a study of Petershausen's twelfth-century chronicle, intended to "keep the bishop at bay." Donahue's essay ventures into new territory, studying the promulgation and copying of diocesan statutes and provincial canons in England and France. The regions reveal remarkably different practices in the later Middle Ages. In relation to Boniface VIII's Periculoso (1298), Makowski shows how universal papal directives for cloistered nuns were only applied when local circumstances, and desires, allowed it.

Two other essays stand out, one for its scholarship and one for its broad interest. Pennington (full disclosure—I am his student) painstakingly tracked down all the Roman law sources in a decretal of Honorius II in 1125, rare in its relaying of legal arguments by both sides in the dispute. Medieval legal scholars will see, in Pennington's source work and command of legal procedure and documents of the time, that he has obliterated many of the arguments of Chris Wickham's Courts and Conflict in Twelfth-Century Tuscany and (more subtly) Anders Winroth's timeline for the progression of Roman law study. Constable briefly examines charter evidence for Urban II's preaching of the crusade, concluding that it "supports the view that the goals of going to Jerusalem and helping the Christians in the east were linked from the beginning" (231).