The Cambridge History of Medieval Canon Law

Canon law touched nearly every aspect of medieval society, including many issues we now think of as purely secular. It regulated marriages, oaths, usury, sorcery, heresy, university life, penance, just war, court procedure, and Christian relations with religious minorities. Canon law also regulated the clergy and the Church, one of the most important institutions in the Middle Ages. This Cambridge History offers a comprehensive survey of canon law, both chronologically and thematically. Written by an international team of scholars, it explores, in non-technical language, how it operated in the daily life of people and in the great political events of the time. The volume demonstrates that medieval canon law holds a unique position in the legal history of Europe. Indeed, the influence of medieval canon law, which was at the forefront of introducing and defining concepts such as 'equity,' 'rationality,' 'office,' and 'positive law,' has been enormous, long-lasting, and remarkably diverse.

Concluding Remarks

This chapter provides some brief concluding remarks.This study contributes to existing research in the sociology of religion and development studies fields by demonstrating the effect of the mutually reinforcing configuration of multiple prosperity triggers (religion–political–environment). Historical Protestantism largely influenced prosperity by promoting education, by secularising institutions, and by stabilising democracy. Protestantism has also proven highly influential in the successive historical law revolutions that gradually mitigated the power of pervasive feudal institutions and of papalist medieval canon law. In contrast, traditionally Roman Catholic countries have generally upheld a medieval model of extractivist institutions until anti-clerical (non-communist) movements were able to weaken this influence in some countries.

“Beds Inlaid With Silver”

It is striking that none of pagan Rome’s jurists felt that the term ‘secularity’, or ‘secularization’, might be necessary to describe a mode of Roman life, or a function of Roman law. Where then do these words originate? ‘Secularity’ is a coinage of medieval Christian writers. When ‘secularity’ occurs in a text by a twelfth-century monk, for instance, it is sharply contrasted with the monastic form of life (conversatio monachorum). And ‘secularization’ is a creation of medieval canon law. Originally, ‘secularization’ signified the protocols for laicizing a monastic in the Roman Church. Though both terms are medieval, this chapter argues that they may ultimately derive from a European Ur-text in which the concept of an ‘age’, or saeculum, is decisive: the Latin New Testament. This chapter seeks to show that the saeculum is a motif in Jesus’ sayings in Luke and in Paul’s letters (in their continent-shaping Latin translations).