Shaping Church Law Around the Year 1000 by Greta Austin

Author:Greta Austin [Austin, Greta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781351900553
Google: wgokDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-05-15T01:28:49+00:00

Chapter 8

Eliminating Conflicts Between Canons

Burchard edited his collection to ensure that his canons appeared to come from authoritative sources. Yet he did not, apparently, believe that all canons attributed to authoritative sources should be included in his collection. Even though he utilized the Libri duo extensively, he did not include absolutely every canon from it. So it is important to identify criteria other than authority which may have shaped his selections among canons.

Like other compilers before him,1 Burchard realized that many existing collections of canon law contained conflicting canons. In his Preface, he complained of dissonance and discord in the canons collected in those books readily available to students and priests in his area. He described the mass of existing texts as an untidy, unsystematic tangle – confusa atque diuersa et inculta ac si ex toto neglecta neglecta et inter se ualde discrepantia et pene nullius auctoritate suffulta, ut propter dissonantiam uix a sdolis possint discerni.2 The conflicting advice given in the texts confused even educated readers and prevented them from consistently deriving legal meaning from the texts.

Although Burchard took his canons from this “confused, varied, disordered” and “neglected” mass of canons, he did so with an eye to selecting canons that agreed with each other. If he could not find canons which were consistent with each other, he made alterations in order to make them appear harmonious. As a result, the Decretum provides a remarkably concise and unified body of law.

To see how Burchard favored consistency, it is useful to compare the Decretum to the text from which he drew the majority of his canons, Regino’s Libri duo. As we have seen, Regino’s collection contains discordant canons. Two or three Libri duo canons may give different solutions for the same problem or case, in part because Regino expected his reader to know how to derive a legal decision by analyzing a wide range of canons.3

By contrast, the Decretum canons assign regular and uniform punishments. Of the 225 Decretum canons studied here, only 4 (or 1.8 percent) give rulings which disagree with other canons in the collection, and one of these was a late addition.4 This uniformity Burchard did not inherit from the existing canon law tradition, nor from the Libri duo in particular. His editorial selections resulted in a relatively harmonious body of law.

This chapter examines in detail how Burchard edited canons in order to eliminate conflicts. It first discusses his selections among Libri duo canons. It then looks at what he chose to add to these canons from other formal sources. Lastly, it focuses on how Burchard modified the texts of canons to make them consistent with each other.

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