Europäische Rechtsgeschichte und kanonisches Recht im Mittelalter: Ausgewählte Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1967 bis 2006 by Peter Landau (review)

This volume collects forty of Peter Landau’s essays, dividing them into six sections. Each essay has a short Addenda, often no more than a paragraph, summarizing the essay with a note about a more recent treatment of the topic by others. The essays incorporate historiographical contextualization, the history of a term or development of a legal norm from Roman law through the medieval (and even early modern) period, and references to modern law. The essays collected here present Landau’s understanding of the significance of medieval canon law in the Western legal tradition more than his technical examination of medieval canon law’s constituent parts.

The first section is on the fundamentals of medieval canon law and includes “Rechtsfortbildung im Dekretalenrecht: Typen und Funktionen der Dekretalen des 12. Jahrhunderts.” One of the more technical essays in the collection, it focuses on the general history of papal decretals through the second half of the twelfth century. Landau seeks to categorize the types of papal decretals in the pre-Compilationes antique collections of the 1160s–1180s and clarifies the variety of circumstances that elicited decretals.

The second section contains essays under the rubric “Principles of Canon Law,” including “Die Anfänge der Unterscheidung von ius publicum und ius privatum in der Geschichte des kanonischen Rechts.” Landau counters the view that the distinction between “public” and “private” law had no functional significance for the medieval church. To the contrary, the controversial Duae leges (Decretum C. 19 q. 2 c. 2) and reflections on self-renunciation of a cleric’s office led to an understanding of a private right or law contained within a regular body of rules.

The third section treats offices and the constitution of the Church. It includes “Der Begriff ordo in der mittelalterlichen Kanonistik,” which traces the varieties of meaning of the term ordo prior to its regular usage from Lyon II as referring to a particular religious order.

Section four contains essays on procedural law, with such interesting topics as the development of the norm that a person cannot be tried more than once for the same crime.

Section five is on marriage law. “Papst Innozenz III. und Wilhemines Ehe: Studien zum possessorischen Verfahren im Eherecht” highlights a major accomplishment of medieval marriage law, namely that the canonists developed rules for different marriage processes. These rules stipulated that a final determination of the validity of a marriage had to precede any permanent decisions about property, and they also stipulated a temporary allocation of assets in processes where the man and woman could not live as a fully married couple before a decision on marital validity was reached.

The final section is on private law and includes an essay on the maxim pacta sunt servanda. Landau explains why canonists, as distinct from the civilians, maintained that people must fulfill their agreements and how they had a broader understanding of which pacta were legally enforceable.

The volume closes with indices that list subjects, names, legal citations, and manuscripts. The volume makes accessible many important essays, several of which were previously available in only hard to access German Festschriften, by one of the leading scholars of medieval canon law over the past half-century. As such, it is a desideratum for any medieval legal historian and any canonist interested in the development of key canonical terms and norms.