Preface
ix Preface Robert Somerville, Professor of History at Columbia University and Ada Byron Bampton Tremaine Professor of Religion at Columbia, has taught there since 1969, except for 1975–1976, when he was at the University of Pennsylvania. He came to New York from Yale University, after a year there as Teaching Fellow and Research Associate in the Department of Religious Studies and the Institute of Medieval Canon Law, a research center directed by Stephan Kuttner. Stephan Kuttner’s influence and friendship characterize Robert Somerville’s extraordinary scholarly work to this day. At Columbia University he has educated generations of undergraduate and graduate students in both the Department of History and in the Department of Religion, where he served as Chair as well as Acting Chair on several occasions. To no one’s surprise, Robert Somerville also devoted much of his indefatigable energy to Butler Library as a member of many advisory committees, in particular those connected with ancient and medieval history. Robert Somerville has established here as well as abroad his position as the preeminent expert on medieval church councils, law, and papal history . His scholarly honors are legion, including a fellowship in the Medieval Academy of America and of the Commission Internationale de Diplomatique . He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a corresponding member of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich as well as of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften) and has received numerous awards, including two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowships. Between the councils of the ancient Church and the Council of Trent there stands a continuous history of church councils, in the East as well as in the West, called to deal with matters of discipline as well as doctrine. Many of these councils remained largely overlooked until Robert Somerville began to explore their canons and decrees which have left significant deposits in medieval canon law and in the history of the papacy. He dis- x preface covered numerous papal and conciliar documents in manuscripts even from periods that had been thought to have been thoroughly mined. All of the councils which Somerville examined now look quite different; they reveal historic reality and significant doctrinal and political developments far more clearly. His primary focus was the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when papal councils constituted the chief means of government for a reformed Church and its incipient centralization. His 1972 publication examined and critically edited the decrees of the Council of Clermont (1095) celebrated by Pope Urban II. This was the famous council at which Urban proclaimed the Crusades to the Holy Land. After his Pope Alexander III and the Council of Tours (1163) had appeared in 1977, he turned to papal diplomatics and published, in 1982, Scotia pontificia, which contains calendars or editions of all letters known to have been sent by the pope before 1198 to addressees in Scotland. The book was awarded the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America, which is the most prestigious book prize among North American medievalists. In his next book he continued his study of late eleventh-century councils and papal letters with Urban II, The Collectio Britannica, and the Council of Melfi (1089), which was published in 1996 with the collaboration of Stephan Kuttner. Somerville’s most recent work, Pope Urban II’s Council of Piacenza, March 1–7, 1095, his analysis and edition of the decrees and acta of Urban’s councils of Piacenza (1095) and of Rome (1099) has just come out. As the reference to the canonical collection Britannica in the title of his volume on the Council of Melfi highlights, canon law manuscripts, mainly from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but certainly not excluding those of the humanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, constitute a major source of information for Robert Somerville’s masterful investigations and reconstructions of councils. As he once confided, he ideally wanted to examine every twelfth-century manuscript still extant in European libraries, always on the hunt for texts that would illuminate the ecclesiastical and political history of this period. The study of medieval canon law is a discipline that calls for a high level of competence in several subjects: history, philology, theology, jurisprudence . As a result, it is also a discipline that most medievalists now neglect, but they do so at their peril. Thanks to Robert Somerville’s researches, the mass of often unpublished canon law manuscripts can now no longer be overlooked as part and parcel of medieval...
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