Papal Jurisprudence, 385-1234: Social Origins and Medieval Reception of Canon Law by David L. d'Avray

Abstract

Reviewed by: Papal Jurisprudence, 385-1234: Social Origins and Medieval Reception of Canon Law by David L. d'Avray Michael Edward Moore d'Avray, David L. Papal Jurisprudence, 385-1234: Social Origins and Medieval Reception of Canon Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. $99.99. Pp. 300. ISBN: 978-1-10867-143-9. In this tightly woven, carefully argued book, the rise of thirteenth-century legal science is explained as the return, or the awkward persistence, of old papal law in new contexts, and the corresponding need for exposition, explanation, and decision-making to resolve complex situations in which the old laws did not readily correspond to a new historical world. This argument is not only about the 'new' situation of ecclesiastical life and jurisprudence from 1100 to 1234, but the long-enduring presence of old papal decisions from the period 400 to 500. How did the old law serve in new situations 700 years later? D'Avray contends that in considering the history of papal jurisprudence, as it flowed into the schools in the age of Johannes Teutonicus and the Liber Extra, the historian must account for two major ages, two key sets of problems, and two principal historical contexts: the first wave and the second wave of papal decretals. 'The main focus of this study is on the parallels and connections between the two decretal ages' (193). Indeed, one of the strong theses of d'Avray book is the existence and mutual reflection of two decretal ages (5th century / 12th century). If the long history of papal law can be described as a structure, it has the shape of a barbell graph. These parallel phases of papal-legal history mirror one another and are also termed 'the first and second decretal waves, c.400 and c. 1200' (213). The book is not concerned to provide a detailed narrative sweeping over all those centuries. Instead, short précis of changing historical circumstances are presented at certain key points in order to demonstrate the dramatic changes leading up to the first and second periods of papal jurisprudence. The scaffolding of European history is somewhat in the background, but helps to explain and orient readers to legal changes. The fall [End Page 217] of the Roman Empire is presented as a great crash, in the strong versions of Peter Heather (106) and Julia Smith (218), rather than the current fashion for seeing continuity instead. There is Peter Brown's thesis that Christianity brought a total change of mentality about death, a re-negotiated social world and the erection of a new cosmos (4). And there is Ian Wood's view that massive transfers of wealth in late antiquity allowed for the substantial take-off of the Church (107). The fall of Rome did not mean the fall of the City, which was able to provide an exceptional degree of intellectual and institutional continuity. In some fine passages d'Avray expresses the nature of Roman memory and continuity as embodied in building programs such as the basilica of Maria Maggiore (107-108). The letters of Pope Leo the Great are similarly described as monuments of memory and recordation (119). After the demise of Attila and the collapse of the Hunnic project, the City of Rome began to take center stage in western Europe (23-24). Carolingian history is briefly alluded to as the frame for the Admonitio Generalis. And so on to the rise of the Ottonian Empire and the dispersal of wealth and political power in post-millenial Europe. D'Avray's analysis of the period 1050-1150 is fascinating. The situation of the clergy had changed. No longer part of a cohesive late antique urban world, the early medieval clergy now found themselves in an agricultural countryside beset by small competing political principalities. Now they lived in the shadow of lords and castles: this was 'a world of rural parishes, utterly different from the original context'—i.e. the context of the old papal decretals regarding such matters as priestly marriage and priestly sexual activity (177). It was not the rise of towns in the early Middle Ages that accounts for the Investiture Controversy and the papal turn...