The Canons of the Third Lateran Council of 1179: Their Origins and Reception by Danica Summerlin (review)

This volume represents the successful transition of Danica Summerlin's dissertation, written under the direction of Dr. Martin Brett at Cambridge, into a book that should be recognized immediately as a valuable contribution to the history of the papacy, medieval canon law, and councils. Summerlin combines detailed research into manuscripts preserving copies of the decrees issued at the Lateran Council of 1179, held under Pope Alexander III (1159-1181), with considerations of broader legal developments, local concerns expressed in surviving letters, and academic debates about particular canonistic issues. Underlying the tedious research are broader questions of papal authority and the development of mechanisms of a centralized ecclesiastical hierarchy. It is precisely this kind of research that is required to answer such larger questions with any sort of historical sophistication.

Summerlin's research fits nicely into recent trends in medieval canon law scholarship. First, she concentrates not just on the papal pageantry of the conciliar event in 1179 and not just on the agenda of the pope and his curia but also on the afterlife and reception of what took place and what was promulgated. The approach is akin to a scholar examining the ur-text of an author and its usage after it starts to be disseminated. The historical impact of an event, of a text, or of a collection of decrees can only be gauged, of course, if its influence is traced. And so, for instance, the import of Burchard of Worms's Decretum takes on new significance when one realizes that the collection continued to be copied after Gratian's Decretum and served as a source for multiple marginal additions in copies of Gratian's work (an example referred to by Summerlin herself, 26). Similarly, the real import of the Lateran decrees of 1179 can only be gauged with reference to the particular ways in which they were disseminated, received, and used in the years after their issuance. That scholarly focus constitutes a necessarily different perspective than one attentive merely to the stable text of canons as represented in a printed edition. Second, and relatedly, Summerlin pays close attention to each and every manuscript copy of the Lateran III decrees in terms of its identity as a unique historical artifact. The copies find their historical value not primarily as being a textual witness to be compared with other textual witnesses that will then be examined in Lachmannian fashion to determine manuscript families based on textual variants and then analyzed in a way to trace back to an ur-text. Like many scholars recently, Summerlin (implicitly) asserts that such a methodology is woefully misguided when it comes to these kinds of texts. 'Canonical compilations', she notes with reference to collections of the reform-era and of Gratian, 'were "living" texts in constant use, adapted by different clerics for varying reasons' (25); by the end of her study, it is apparent that the Lateran III canons too were neither static nor uniform. While paying attention to textual variants and similarities, Summerlin demonstrates that the scholar much more profitably turns his or her attention to understanding each copy in its place within its own codex, whether as an appendix of sorts or integrated into other material, and to investigating how these decrees fit with the purpose of the codex as a whole, whether that codex includes a chronicle or a collection of recent papal decretals. Third, Summerlin questions traditional assumptions rooted in early modern and modern taxonomies of texts and events. Sometimes longstanding categories have impeded historical perception; in this case, the naming of ecumenical councils and modern ideas of legislative processes and authority have impeded an accurate comprehension of what it meant for a twelfth-century pope to hold a council and to promulgate decrees at it. The fact that the Third Lateran Council received that...