Freedom and protection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kriston R. Rennie
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Papal Authority

This book examines the history of monastic exemption in France. It maps an institutional story of monastic freedom and protection, which is deeply rooted in the religious, political, social, and legal culture of the early Middle Ages. Traversing many geo-political boundaries and fields of historical specialisation, this book evaluates the nature and extent of papal involvement in French monasteries between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Defining the meaning and value of exemption to medieval contemporaries during this era, it demonstrates how the papacy’s commitment, cooperation, and intervention transformed existing ecclesiastical and political structures. Charting the elaboration of monastic exemption privileges from a marginalised to centralised practice, this book asks why so many French monasteries were seeking exemption privileges directly from Rome; what significance they held for monks, bishops, secular rulers, and popes; how and why this practice developed throughout the early Middle Ages; and, ultimately, what impact monastic exemption had on the emerging identity of papal authority, the growth of early monasticism, Frankish politics and governance, church reform, and canon law.

Il giuramento di innocenza nel processo canonico medievale

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Fiori
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Criminal Offence ◽  
Legal Procedure ◽  
Canonical Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Short Space ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

The oath of innocence, or purgation, constituted a part of canon law for almost a millennium. It has nevertheless been largely neglected by studies on medieval canonical procedure. This book seeks to reconstruct the history of the oath of purgation specifically from the perspective of canon law. Over the centuries, the function of the so-called "purgatio canonica" never changed: priests of the Church were required to swear their innocence when charged with any criminal offence for which evidence of guilt was lacking. It is while dealing with the canonical purgation that the canonists also developed the notion of infamia facti, a concept of social disrepute with real legal significance. Within a short space of time this inspired the most significant innovations in medieval legal procedure: the introduction of the inquisitorial process alongside the accusatorial model, the elaboration of a canonical theory of legal presumptions, and the justification of judicial torture. The history of the oath of purgation thus provides a unique perspective from which to observe the transformations which occurred in canon law procedure and wider legal culture throughout the course of the Middle Ages.

The Church and the Law in the Early Middle Ages

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 7-35
Author(s):  
Rosamond McKitterick
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Procedural Knowledge ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Manuscript ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function

Two case studies from eighth-century Rome, recorded in the early medieval history of the popes known as the Liber pontificalis, serve to introduce both the problems of the relations between secular or public and ecclesiastical or canon law in early medieval Rome and the development of early medieval canon law more generally. The Synod of Rome in 769 was convened by Pope Stephen III some months after his election in order to justify the deposition of his immediate predecessor, Pope Constantine II (767–8). Stephen's successor, Pope Hadrian, subsequently presided over a murder investigation involving Stephen's supporters. The murders and the legal process they precipitated form the bulk of the discussion. The article explores the immediate implications of both the murders and the convening of the Synod of Rome, together with the references to law-making and decree-giving by the pope embedded in the historical narrative of the Liber pontificalis, as well as the possible role of the Liber pontificalis itself in bolstering the imaginative and historical understanding of papal and synodal authority. The wider legal or procedural knowledge invoked and the development of both canon law and papal authority in the early Middle Ages are addressed. The general categories within which most scholars have been working hitherto mask the questions about the complicated and still insufficiently understood status and function of early medieval manuscript compilations of secular and canon law, and about the authority and applicability of the texts they contain.

scholarly journals Manipulating the Message: Letters of Gelasius and Nicholas I on Papal Authority

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bronwen Neil
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Papal Authority ◽  
The Way

Gelasius I, bishop of Rome during the problematic period of Odoacer’s replacement as rex Italiae in 493, was greatly concerned with the power of the bishop of Rome. While Gelasius was one of the most significant bishops of the first five hundred years of the Roman church, he is primarily known for his letter to the Byzantine emperor Anastasius in 494. His Epistula 12 introduced the controversial theory of “two powers” or “two swords.” The idea was taken up in the mid-ninth century by another champion for papal primacy, when Nicholas I embedded a quote from Gelasius in his denunciation of the Byzantine emperor Michael III. I examine the use of political rhetoric in ecclesiastical contexts in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, in particular the way that extracts from such letters could go on to have a life of their own in canon law. Finally, I measure the historical impact of each letter as a form of soft diplomacy.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

Byzantine Religious Law in Medieval Italy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Morton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Southern Italy ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Religious Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Byzantine Church

This book is a historical study of these manuscripts, exploring how and why the Greek Christians of medieval southern Italy persisted in using them so long after the end of Byzantine rule. Southern Italy was conquered by the Norman Hauteville dynasty in the late eleventh century after over 500 years of continuous Byzantine rule. At a stroke, the region’s Greek Christian inhabitants were cut off from their Orthodox compatriots in Byzantium and became subject to the spiritual and legal jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic popes. Nonetheless, they continued to follow the religious laws of the Byzantine church; out of thirty-six surviving manuscripts of Byzantine canon law produced between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, the majority date to the centuries after the Norman conquest. Part I provides an overview of the source material and the history of Italo-Greek Christianity. Part II examines the development of Italo-Greek canon law manuscripts from the last century of Byzantine rule to the late twelfth century, arguing that the Normans’ opposition to papal authority created a laissez faire atmosphere in which Greek Christians could continue to follow Byzantine religious law unchallenged. Finally, Part III analyses the papacy’s successful efforts to assert its jurisdiction over southern Italy in the later Middle Ages. While this brought about the end of Byzantine canon law as an effective legal system in the region, the Italo-Greeks still drew on their legal heritage to explain and justify their distinctive religious rites to their Latin neighbours.

The Question of Francia (400–816)

On Hospitals ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 59-79
Author(s):  
Sethina Watson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Common Life ◽  
Hospital Reform ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Many

The consistency of the character of hospitals in law, as observed in Chapter 2, suggests a customary legal inheritance that preceded classical canon law. Part II turns now to the early middle ages to discover that inheritance. This chapter begins that process by unpicking the long-held model of the early medieval hospital. It surveys the many hypotheses for the origins of hospital law in the West, which claim that hospital law adopted from the East and accommodated via Frankish councils. The chapter confronts the latter of these claims and re-examines its twin pillars: a legal formula of ‘murderers of the poor’ (necator pauperum) and a hospital reform at Aachen (816). The first hinges on the council of Orléans (549), whose efforts were aimed at one royal foundation, King Childebert and Queen Ultrogotha’s xenodochium at Lyons. The council of Aachen’s (816) rules for canons and canonesses prescribed a way of common life for these religious, with different facilities for each for the poor. The chapter argues that the efforts of both councils were singular, and carefully circumscribed. Frankish councils were not to take an interest in xenodochia until c.850. Legal initiatives regarding hospitals began elsewhere.

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