Pope Leo of Bourges, clerical immunity and the early medieval secular

Charles West

doi:10.1111/emed.12450

Abstract

This article investigates the early medieval secular through the lens of clerical immunity – that is, the legal exemption of clerics from courts labelled as secular. It focusses on a short text, eventually attributed to Pope Leo, which was written in fifth‐century Gaul to define this immunity. By pursuing this text’s fate as it was revised and put to use into the eleventh century, the article demonstrates how the early medieval secular was a religious category employed for different purposes at different times.

Highlights

This article investigates the early medieval secular through the lens of clerical immunity – that is, the legal exemption of clerics from courts labelled as secular. It focusses on a short text, eventually attributed to Pope Leo, which was written in fifth-century Gaul to define this immunity. By pursuing this text’s fate as it was revised and put to use into the eleventh century, the article demonstrates how the early medieval secular was a religious category employed for different purposes at different times
A conventional synthesis of the early history of clerical legal immunity might run as follows
After his dramatic conversion to Christianity, Emperor Constantine I kept most clerics under the jurisdiction of Roman law for criminal matters, but he and his successors ceded some ground for bishops, though even they could still be tried in a secular court if first found guilty in a clerical one

Summary

CHARLES WEST

This article investigates the early medieval secular through the lens of clerical immunity – that is, the legal exemption of clerics from courts labelled as secular It focusses on a short text, eventually attributed to Pope Leo, which was written in fifth-century Gaul to define this immunity. In recent years, the argument has been forcefully made across a range of fields that, far from being a neutral or universal category, the secular is in reality ‘a historically produced idea’, and, one that encodes a disguised theology.[4] As a consequence, ‘to tell a story of secularism is to simultaneously render its Christian underpinnings visible’.5 This scholarship has significant implications for the early Middle Ages. It does so through a quite specific lens: the issue of clerical legal immunity from secular courts, sometimes known as the privilegium fori. This article will first present a synopsis of the existing historiography on the subject, before tracing the vicissitudes of a single revealing text from the fifth to the eleventh century as a means of addressing this delicate problematic

The historiography of clerical legal immunity in the early Middle Ages

Tantam saeculi potestates and the Collectio Pithouensis

The Carolingian reception of Tantam saeculi potestates

Tantam saecularis potestates and the early medieval secular