Destroyed but not Lost: A Digital Reconstruction of the Chartrain Copy of Burchard's Liber decretorum (Chartres BM 161)

Part I: Burchard's Place in the History of Canon Law

The Liber decretorum compiled shortly before 1023 by Burchard of Worms (†1025) was the most influential canon law collection of the eleventh century. Bishops, abbots, teachers, and many other prelates valued the Liber decretorum as a comprehensive, well-structured canon law collection covering a very wide range of issues; it was copied frequently, and many compilers used Burchard's work as a model for their own canonical collections. Thus, not only are there some 100 medieval copies (or fragments thereof) still extant, but also a large number of other collections drawing on the Liber decretorum. Crucially, this group includes the Decretum of Ivo of Chartres, which incorporated most of Burchard's Liber decretorum and in turn became widely influential both in its own right and via the large number of derivative collections drawing on it.

Via these later collections, the decisions Burchard had made in omitting, retaining, reworking, and arranging his material had a profound impact on medieval and even early modern canon law, if only because material not found in his comprehensive collection had a significantly lower chance of being included in any of the most influential collections of the twelfth century. After all, the Tripartita (in part B), the Panormia, and the Decretum Gratiani all depend either directly or indirectly on the Decretum of Ivo of Chartres mentioned above as an important Burchard derivative.

Yet before the Burchadian material ended up (or not) in the collections of the twelfth century, the Liber decretorum already had undergone considerable changes. From early on, the Liber decretorum existed in different versions, as Burchard and his collaborators were still making additions and other changes to their work when the collection began to be used outside Worms.² As Hoffmann and Pokorny established, the arrangement of canons differs significantly already among the very early copies. In particular, they distinguish two variants of the 'Order of Worms': 'type A' (found only in the Vatican double codex, two Würzburg copies, and the editio princeps), and 'type B', also known as 'Frankfurt' order, which is found in almost all extant copies of the Liber decretorum. For the textual history of the collection, special attention has to be paid to the reception of Burchard in northern Italy, as it was here that several distinct versions emerged in the second half of the eleventh century. The most important branch of transmission are the so-called 'deteriores' manuscripts. As Gérard Fransen demonstrated in a number of studies,³ many copies of the Liber decretorum go back directly or indirectly to exemplars which either have a number of distinctive omissions in books 8, 12, 19, and 20, or 'scars' suggesting that these gaps had been mended one way or the other. By 'scars' we refer to all phenomena which can be best explained as the result of adding some or all of the missing canons from a complete version of the Liber decretorum. For example, the missing material may be found in the margin rather than the main text, inserted at the end of the respective book, written by a different hand, and/or the gaps may be commented upon; sometimes, canons were conflated (or mutilated) as a result of the insertion of missing material, or inscriptions became muddled, or the capitulatio was not, or not adequately, brought up to date. As already Fransen observed, some of these features were often preserved, at least in part, when new copies were made from such 'mended' exemplars. For example, the phrase 'hic minus habetur' in several Burchard manuscripts is found in the main text of a canon to which it originally was a marginal comment.⁴

In all probability, the characteristic gaps first occurred with a Burchard manuscript written in or brought to northern Italy in the mid-eleventh century. Indeed, most Burchard copies written in northern Italy display the characteristic 'deteriores' gaps and/or 'scars' in the above sense; vice versa, most extant manuscripts belonging to the...