The essays gathered by Christof Rolker in this volume examine the so-called "master narrative" of medieval canon law, which is to say the methodological and interpretive approach to canon law collections developed by Paul Fournier around the turn of the twentieth century and enshrined in his (written along with his student, Gabriel Le Bras)Histoire des collections canoniques en Occident depuis les fausses décrétales jusqu'au décret de Gratien (1931-32).
Rolker's first chapter ("Fournier's Model and its Merits") summarizes Fournier's life and work. As Rolker argues, the nineteenth century was not kind to medieval canon law. Insofar as canon law collections were actually studied, they were viewed primarily as vehicles for the transmission of Roman law and authentic papal decretals. It was only right at the end of the nineteenth century that Fournier and others, motivated by contemporary political debates regarding the relationship between church and state, began to rediscover canon law collections as valuable sources of legal and political history. Although Fournier was trained in Roman law and held a Roman law chair in Grenoble, he began in the 1880s to focus his research almost entirely on medieval canon law. Fournier worked first on later medieval episcopal courts (officialités) in France, but soon shifted his attention to pre-Gratian (c. 1140) canon law collections compiled between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Fournier's many publications on this subject between 1880 and 1920 acquired for him considerable fame. In 1914 he became professor in Paris and in 1920, he was granted the first chair of canon law to be created since the French Revolution.
Fournier's methodological approach to canon law collections involved examining their contents and structure so as to identify potential sources, compilers, and dates of composition. In the process, he introduced many minor collections to modern scholarship for the first time. Fournier's interpretive approach to canon law collections would also have lasting impact. For Fournier, every collection, even the most minor ones, must be interpreted through the lens of contemporary political, theological, and ecclesiological debates. Every collection reflects serious engagement with the canonical tradition and an active attempt to (re)shape that tradition in one direction or other. From this perspective, details such as sources, contents, and structure, as well as the biography of the author, take on a great deal of meaning. For Fournier, these details allowed him to associate individual collections with broader causes.
Fournier was especially invested in the idea of a so-called papal reform movement which began in the middle of the eleventh century. As the story goes, a group of reformers under Pope Leo IX sought to 1) remove secular influence from the Church, 2) to reform the habits of clergy, monks, and nuns, and 3) to establish a centralized ecclesiastical structure with the pope at its head. The movement gained momentum under Gregory VII and Urban II, and culminated in the "papal monarchy" of Alexander III and Innocent III. According to Fournier, canon law was a crucial battlefield on which the reformers waged their campaign. Under Gregory VII, canonists such as Anselm II of Lucca and Bonizo of Sutri assembled new collections which promoted papal authority and elevated papal decretals as the central source of canon law. The material they gathered, including newly rediscovered texts of Roman law, then provided the raw materials for a second wave of reform canonists under Urban II, which included Ivo of Chartres, Alger of Liege, and Bernold of Constance. In order to resolve lingering contradictions, this second group borrowed dialectical techniques from the nascent scholastic movement and applied them to the texts assembled by the first group. These efforts eventually culminated in Gratian's Decretum (c. 1140), which systematized canon law in line with the views of the reformers.
As Rolker makes clear, Fournier's narrative of papal reform is no longer widely accepted, at least in its extreme form. Individuals popes certainly sought to enhance the power of the papacy, but there is little evidence of a conscious multi-generational effort guided by any single vision. Furthermore, many diverse local actors pursued elements of the reform independently of papal guidance. In terms of canon law, Gregory VII's own legislation had little lasting impact and many of the canon law collections which Fournier cast as ardent partisans of papal reform have been shown to be far more ambiguous than he let on. Those few collections which do seem to push a strong papal reform agenda exist in only a handful of manuscripts and had relatively little influence.
Even if much of the papal reform narrative in doubt, Fournier's basic approach to canon law collections is alive and well. As Rolker explains, historians still tend to seek within the contents and structure of individual collections, as well as in the biographies of their compilers, evidence of political, theological, or intellectual partisanship. Rolker concludes his chapter: "If scholars of the past two decades in particular have argued against Fournier's historical narrative of 'reform,' they often relied on Fournier's methods, and this way have confirmed the merits of Fournier's model." (32)
The subsequent essays both deconstruct aspects of Fournier's reform narrative and propose new methodological approaches to canon law texts. Kathleen G. Cushing ("Law and Reform: The Transmission of Burchard of Worms' Liber decretorum") examines the manuscript transmission of Burchard's Decretum (c. 1023) in light of Fournier's claim that it quickly fell out of use after 1100. Contrary to this idea, Cushing shows that theDecretum continued to be actively copied throughout the twelfth century--especially in Italy--and that it was frequently cited by canonists such as Anselm and Ivo. Although Gratian did not cite from Burchard directly, the Decretist commentators did, and some of Burchard's canons were later added to Gratian's collection as paleae. As Cushing explains, because Fournier insisted that the papal reform collections represented an innovative break from the past, he was forced to cast Burchard in an unfairly negative light. Cushing urges us to take a nuanced view of legal transformation in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries which acknowledges continuity as well as innovation.
Greta Austin ("New Narratives for the Gregorian Reform") likewise challenges Fournier's narrative of radical legal change, but on theoretical and historiographical grounds. Austin contends that Fournier relied too heavily on teleological notions of progressive revolutions driven by individual geniuses and methodological breakthroughs. By focusing so narrowly on a few leaders, Fournier overlooked what are actually fascinating developments in local canon law. Austin summarizes recent scholarship to show that very few collections actually fit into Fournier's papal reform mold and argues that we must look to local interests and motivations to explain the widespread growth of legal activity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
John S. Ott ("Clerical Networks and Canon Law: The Beauvais Election Controversy of 1100-04") echoes Austin's call to focus on local canonical affairs by re-examining the contested episcopal election of Beauvais which occurred between 1100 and 1104. Among the key figures were Archbishop Manassas II of Reims, Bishop Lambert of Arras, Bishop John of Thérouanne, Bishop Ivo of Chartres, King Philip I of France, and Pope Paschal II. The controversy centered on the election of Stephen of Garlande, an archdeacon and royal chaplain in Paris, as bishop of Beauvais. Ivo of Chartres challenged his election on the grounds that Stephen was only in minor clerical orders and had previously been excommunicated for adultery. Philip I and Manassas II supported Stephen while Paschal II joined Ivo in opposition. Although both sides sought to win over Lambert and John, they held firmly to the middle ground and acted as mediators. The conflict was eventually resolved when a new royal candidate acceptable to Paschal was nominated for Beauvais while Ivo's candidate was compensated by becoming bishop of Paris. Although the Beauvais controversy has been traditionally understood as a proxy battle between Philip I and Paschal II, between state and church, and between conservatism and reform, Ott is able to show that these categories don't easily map out onto the individual actors who each had complex motives and nuanced relationships. Ott's study admirably demonstrates the value of studying canon law in reference to local affairs.
Tatsushi Genka ("The Role of Hagiography in the Development of Canon Law in the Reform Era") explores the development of the idea of a hierarchy of canonical sources with papal decretals at the top. According to Fournier, this idea can first be observed around 1100 in Bernold of Constance's De fontibus iuris ecclesiastici. Through a hierarchical reading of the apostolic succession, Bernold reasoned that the letters of the popes--as the heirs of St. Peter--must be weighed above other sources such as conciliar decrees insofar as discrepancies arise. Genka is able to show, however, that this idea was already present a half century earlier in the writing of Peter Damian. In sermons given in Ravenna and Milan, Damian reasoned that both churches owed allegiance to Rome because their founding saints can trace their apostolic lineage back to Peter and Paul. Genka is further able to show that in later letters to Cardinal Hildebrand (later Pope Gregory VII), Damian voiced support for a normative expression of a hierarchy of canonical sources based on these principles.
John C. Wei ("Of Scholasticism and Canon Law: Narratives Old and New") deconstructs the "Great Man" narrative of twelfth-century scholasticism and canon law which closely links Gratian with Peter Abelard and/or Anselm of Laon. Peter Abelard, as Wei demonstrates, was actually a marginal figure in the history of scholastic theology before the nineteenth century. It was only following the rediscovery of the Sic et Non around 1830 that nationalist French scholars elevated him to prominence and identified him as Gratian's source for cutting-edge scholastic dialectic. As Wei demonstrates, there is actually little evidence to link Abelard to Gratian (especially in the first recension). Wei also questions more recent attempts to associate Gratian with the school of Anselm of Laon. Although Gratian cites works associated with Anselm's school, he used versions locally available in Italy and probably did not know Anselm directly. Wei's work on scholastic florilegia sheds light upon a vast and vibrant underbelly of intellectual activity which has been obscured by the modern desire to focus on great schools led by great men.
Stephan Dusil ("The Decretum of Gratian: A Janus-Faced Collection") investigates the structure and organization of the first and second recensions of Gratian's Decretum in reference to previous canon law collections of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Using the topic of clerical celibacy as a test case, Dusil finds that the first recension contains a concise, coherent, and argumentative structure. Gratian weighs and evaluates his sources using novel considerations of time, place, and cause to resolve discrepancies. In contrast, Dusil finds that the second recension introduces a great deal of new texts which mostly reinforce Gratian's positions, but also make the Decretum less concise and coherent. Dusil argues that the changes in the second recension are more in line with the structure and methods employed in older canon law collections such as thePanormia.
Danica Summerlin ("Using the 'Old Law' in Twelfth-Century Decretal Collections") concludes the book by reassessing the prominence given to papal decretals in canonical collections of the later twelfth century. Following Fournier, most twentieth-century historians have assumed that Gratian's Decretum marked a watershed after which new papal decretals supplanted older sources of canon law. Summerlin is able to show that the manuscript evidence paints a different picture. Until the very end of the twelfth century, collections based mainly on newer papal decretals are dwarfed in number by copies of Gratian's Decretum, Decretist commentaries, and by older collections such as Burchard's Decretum and the Panormia. Furthermore, Summerlin shows that even those collections of papal decretals which have been held up as prime examples of the newer trend often contain substantial material from older sources. According to Summerlin, the emergence of recent papal decretals as the defining source of canon law was a much slower process than has previously been assumed.
All of the contributions in this volume provide helpful correctives to aspects of Fournier's narrative and are successfully united by sustained methodological criticism. Across the essays, the most common criticism of Fournier's method is that it does not give sufficient attention to local interests. Several of the contributors call for renewed research into the local context in which canon law collections were compiled and used. In doing so, historians should consider the role canon law collections played in the everyday needs of diocesan administration, pastoral care, education, and local politics. My only concern is that such a narrow focus on Fournier and his method risks overstating his influence on contemporary and subsequent canon law research. As this volume makes clear, narratives which rely too heavily on great men, great works, and sudden innovations are never entirely satisfying. Nevertheless, the valuable historiographical and methodological reflection provided in this volume makes it a must-read for anyone interested in canon law, theology, and church history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.