Three Manuscripts Containing the Canons of the 1179 Lateran Council

Alexander III’s 1179 Lateran council was held to celebrate the end of an eighteen-year schism between the papacy and the Empire. It also promulgated a series of around twenty-seven conciliar canons that entered into the later-twelfth century decretal collections and, ultimately, the Liber Extra, and is more often referred to as the Third Lateran Council or Lateran III.¹ The transmission of those conciliar decrees is the focus of this paper, and in particular three manuscripts which provide examples of the dissemination of copies of the canons that differ, in some cases radically, from the 1179 canons as found in the decretal collections and the standard modern reference work, the Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, or COD. Two, British Library Cotton Claudius A.iv and Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz Savigny 3, demonstrate the canons being excerpted for their legally pertinent information. The third, Vatican Library Reg. lat. 984, goes much further, even to the point where it may support hints found elsewhere in the manuscript tradition that drafts of the canons accidentally circulated, masquerading as the canons themselves simply because no ‘official’ copy of the canons existed.

Overall, the 1179 decrees have a remarkable coherence. Despite their apparently constantly-changing sequence,² most scholars have presumed that the conciliar canons stayed essentially the same across every tradition. General histories of the papacy refer to the canons as part of a long-term papal legislative agenda pushed forward during the twelfth century.³ Holtzmann once suggested that the council commanded the dissemination of the decretal collections, although he later retracted that hypothesis.⁴ Even Walter Herold, whose 1952 thesis on the canons attempted in part to reconstitute their ‘lost’ initial sequence, failed to challenge the prevailing view that Alexander used the council to promulgate a legislative agenda that was then, broadly speaking, instituted.⁵ In the opinion of Raymonde Foreville, that agenda can be teased from Alexander’s earlier decretals.⁶ Her recent challenges to the legislative authority of those decretals notwithstanding, Anne Duggan’s 2008 study for the History of Medieval Canon Law in the Classical Period also investigated the 1179 decrees on the basis that they were designed and received as legislative acts.⁷ Only two studies have challenged that perspective. Gérard Fransen’s 1982 analysis of the decrees’ canonical reception was as concerned with whether the canons were accepted as it was with how they were, but it can provide only an introductory study to a complex issue.⁸ Most recently, Atria Larson and Richard Engl have opened the possibility that additional decrees were at least discussed in the conciliar sessions.⁹ In contrast to the majority of these scholars and in keeping with the scepticism expressed by Fransen and Engl and Larson, however, I would argue that the 1179 decrees only gradually became accepted as overarching legal authorities, in much the same way as papal decretals gained widespread acceptance through their transmission in the decretal collections. While the presence of a papal version of the canons cannot be doubted, it appears that the circulated texts depended on other sources such as local bishops and, of course, the decretal collections.

No papal letters promulgating the 1179 decrees survive. Given that Quoniam in agro, the letter that summoned the council, survives in five known copies sent to the archbishops, bishops, and abbots of Bourges, Hungary, Pisa, Salzburg and Tours, it seems unlikely that any letter of Alexander promulgating the canons was considered to have legal force.¹⁰ The absence of a letter formally repeating the canons or their fundamental tenets nevertheless provides an interesting contrast to Gregory VII and Lucius III. The former is known to have repeated edicts from his synods to local bishops in letters.¹¹ That Lucius III also repeated the bulk of Ad abolendam in a letter to Peter, bishop of Arras, sent from Verona in 1184 demonstrates continuity between the pre- and post-Gratian eras.¹² It is therefore intriguing that no certain record of a papal attempt to circulate the 1179 decrees survives. A sole manuscript hints at such...