The Fundamental and Ornamental Use of Scripture in Two Dominican Procedurals on Confession from the Early Thirteenth Century: Cum ad sacerdotes and Confessio debet

Abstract

Abstract Although the expansion of jurisprudence in the twelfth century was a direct outgrowth of theological scholasticism, several historians of law such as Richard Helmholz have noted that the use of sacred scripture as a basis for jurisprudence steadily declined in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He identified the increasing relegation of biblical references to an ornamental, rather than a fundamental, mode of citation beginning with the earliest post-Gratian glosses and treatises. Because the Dominican Order of Preachers, renowned for their biblical preaching, also produced many great canonists and legal texts, the question of whether their legal writings experienced a similar decline is of particular interest. In the present study, a close reading of two Dominican procedurals for confessors and penitents will conclude that the Dominicans themselves recognized the difference between fundamental and ornamental citation and that they began to streamline their biblical references, removing ornamental and leaving only fundamental citations.