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Introduction Medieval Church Law as a Field of Historical Inquiry Wolfgang P. Müller n The Subject The study of medieval ecclesiastical norms, known among experts as ‘medieval canon law’ (from the Greek word, kanōn, for ‘rule’), concerns the period roughly coinciding with the Western Middle Ages, between 500 and 1500 a.d. Its geographical focus includes all territories of the Latin Church, as opposed to the Eastern European areas of ‘Byzantine Canon Law’, which rather followed Greek liturgy and were culturally oriented toward the capital of the former Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople or Byzantium .1 The fundamental difference between the two, Greek and Latin, hemispheres, politically reinforced by the fourth-century division of the Roman Empire and sealed by the schism (from 1054) between Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic Christianity , has further prompted modern students to extend their investigations to the Latin canonical texts of late Antiquity. Regarding the exact chronological boundaries separating medieval canon law from early modernity, on the other hand, the definitive breakup of religious unity in the West, marked by the establishment of Protestant churches in the 1520s and 1530s and the Catholic ‘Counter’-Reformation set into motion by the Council of Trent (1545–63), has commonly been accepted as the demise of the medieval Church, in general as well as in legal and institutional terms. Within the given spatial and chronological limitations of medieval canon law, scholars have subdivided their subject into two principal phases, one preceding, and the other beginning with, the publication of Gratian’s ‘Concordance of Discordant Canons’, or Decretum, around the year 1140. The significance of the distinction between canon law ‘pre-Gratian’ and ‘post-Gratian’ cannot be overrated. To capture its enormous cultural  1. See C. Gallagher, Church Law and Church Order in Rome and Byzantium. A Comparative Study (Aldershot 2002); see also The History of Byzantine and Eastern Canon Law to 1500 (HMCL; Washington, DC; to appear). connotations, legal historian Manlio Bellomo has succinctly characterized the time from 500 to 1140 as an ‘Age Without Jurists’.2 Conversely, Stephan Kuttner has greeted the contribution of Gratian and his successors as ‘The Revival of Jurisprudence’, that is, the return of professional lawyers who, upon the demise of Roman Antiquity, had completely disappeared from the Latin West.3 In the light of Kuttner’s and Bellomo’s sweeping affirmations, what exactly constituted the essence of Gratian’s accomplishment , rendering it, as is widely assumed, an event of truly epochal proportions? Although difficult to imagine for modern Westerners, the societal conditions permitting continued reliance on professional legal expertise had been wanting prior to the twelfth-century rise of ‘Universities’, urban centers of higher education that offered students the prototypes of a ‘scholastic’ study program. Gratian belonged to the generation of intellectual ‘Founding Fathers’, who managed to place the newly emerging theological, medical, and legal disciplines on sound ‘scientific’ foundations. As it turned out, he put together a textbook for lectures in canon law that was comprehensive , systematic, and methodically compelling at the same time. In classrooms across Western Europe, the final version of his Decretum quickly eclipsed all older canon law collections. While preserving most of the authoritative material compiled and transmitted over the centuries, Gratian chose to display the normative tradition in an unprecedented dialectic arrangement, juxtaposing canons in support of (pro) as well as against (contra) propositions said to reveal the canonical truth. In addition, Gratian suppliedarunningcommentary(dicta)ofhisown,expresslyinvitingreaderstoidentify contradictions between ‘Discordant Canons’. Through informed reasoning, they were to be reduced to the ‘Concordance’ of real, that is to say, coherent ‘canonistic’ doctrine. For many generations, concern about internal inconsistencies between Church norms had been minimal, limited to single-handed corrections or rhetorical exercises in the prefaces of early medieval canon law collections. The greatest ‘turning point’ in the history of canon law was reached when scholastic teachers like Gratian, swept into the limelight by a rapidly growing intellectual trend, established the elimination of logical ‘dissonances’ for the sake of overall doctrinal ‘harmony’ as the principal assignment of academic professionals.4 The canonists, juristic experts trained in the canons, and the ‘science’ of canon law were born. 2. M. Bellomo, The Common Legal Past of Europe 1000–1800, trans. L. Cochrane (Washington, DC 1995) 22– 41 (heading of chapter 2); see also the title of Part One in the present volume. 3. S. Kuttner, ‘The Revival of Jurisprudence’, in: Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. R. Benson and G. Constable (Cambridge, MA 1982) 299–323...

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