Medieval Canon Law by James A. Brundage

Abstract

book reviews755 hat to Celticists. But most readers wiU find it and the other essays to be a good introduction to a Christianizing culture. Lisa M. Bitel University ofKansas Medieval Medieval Canon Law. By James A. Brundage. [The MedievalWorld.] (NewYork: Longman. 1995. Pp. xii, 260. $12.99 paperback.) In the course of the last fifty years American historians of the Middle Ages have come to realize the remarkable role canon law played in the development ofWestern Europe. Canon Law "formed a crucial component of medieval life and thought. Its rules affected the Uves and actions of practicaUy everyone, its enforcement mechanisms were increasingly able to reach into everyday affairs at aU social levels, from peasant villages to royal households, and the ideas debated in the canon law schools constituted an influential and pervasive element in medieval intellectual life."The records of church courts and the archives of ecclesiastical administrators "make up a very large fraction of the evidence that survives from the Middle Ages" (p. ix). Up until the appearance of this volume, however, novices had at hand no really appropriate survey of the discipline in English, beyond articles in encyclopedias and the Dictionary ofthe Middle Ages. There was only the history ofthe sources in Amleto Cicognani's Canon Law, but that was outdated (1935), and the one hundred pages devoted to the classical period served mainly as a reference source.The 1951 lectures of Bishop R. C. Mortimer of Exeter at the Berkeley campus ofThe University of California, later published as Western Canon Law, though exceptionally well worth reading even today, necessarily lacked the desirable depth. ConstantVan deWeil's History ofCanon Law (1991), No. 5 of the University of Louvain's "Theological and Pastoral Monographs," was too brief; it made no attempt to deal with significant issues and was not helpfully organized . Brundage, on the other hand, has managed to give an in-depth treatment of a very complex subject while avoiding the temptation of the expert to include less significant authors and developments. Especially valuable, even to one knowledgeable in the field, are the up-to-date bibliographical references in the notes.The two appendices, the Romano-canonical citation system and the biographical notes on the major canonists of the classical period, will also prove useful to professional historians. The first three chapters survey chronologicaUy the development of law from its beginnings in the early Christian Church, through the early Middle Ages, and cUfnaxing in the classical period from Gratian (1 140) to the Black Death (1348). The symbiotic relationship between the two learned laws, canon law and 756book reviews Roman law, "(so caUed in contrast to customary law and municipal statutory law, which were not typicaUy subjects of formal study in university law faculties )" and the meaning of the ¿us commune are particularly well analyzed. The next chapter demonstrates the extent to which canon law affected the private life of individuals. "Church courts exercised jurisdiction, for example, over marriage and the termination of marriage, the legitimacy of children, aU types of sexual conduct, commercial and financial behaviour, the legitimate times and conditions of labour, poor rehef, wills and testaments and burial of the dead" (p. 71).The chapter on public life explains how"out ofthe elaboration of canonical corporation theory, emerged some novel poUtical ideas that have subsequently become basic to modern Western notions about constitutional government" (p. 104).Two chapters deal with church courts and procedure and with canonical jurisprudence. A final chapter explores the widespread ramifications of canon law in Western societies. In conclusion, "the speculations and insights of medieval canonists remain enshrined both within the common law tradition of the EngUsh-speaking world and within the civil law heritage of Continental Europeans. This is most obviously true in famUy law and testamentary law, but canonical tradition is also evident in many other branches of the law—contracts, torts, property law, and corporation law among them. . . . Medieval canon law, in short, constituted a fundamental formative force in the creation of some of the elemental ideas and institutions that continue to this day to characterizeWestern societies" (p. 189). Brundage, a past president of the American Catholic Historical Association and the author of numerous books and articles...