The question these articles seek to respond to, in this fifth collection by Jean Gaudemet to be published by Variorum, is how the intellectual elite of the medieval Church perceived the institutions among which they lived - how they portrayed them, and how they sought to influence them. Whether dealing with the papacy and its place in the Church and the world, with the role of the people in government, or with the position of the individual in society, he would argue that this is the essential question. In their response, this elite drew on the Bible and custom, on Roman law and papal letters, in order that the law could encompass all human experience. To achieve this, these jurists needed to create categories and work out principles, hence the recourse to theology and the necessity for a logical structure, a ’systematization’. Ce volume réunit dix-sept études parues dans diverses revues ou recueils de Mélanges entre 1988 et 1992. Toutes concernent La doctrine canonique médiévale telle qu'elle s'exprime (principalement du VIè au XIIIè siècle) à propos des institutions de l'Eglise et de ses relations avec la société séculière. Comment l'élite intellectuelle des hommes de l'Eglise médiévale a-t-elle perçu les institutions au milieu desquelles elle vivait? Quelle image a-t-elle voulu en donner? Dans quelle voie espérait-elle les orienter? Qu'il s'agisse de la Papauté, de se place dans l'Eglise et dans le Monde, du rôle du Peuple dans le gouvernement, du sort de l'individu dans le group social, de l'entrée dans l'Eglise et de la condition de ceux qui lui restent étrangers, la question reste la même: Comment le droit peut-il saisir l'infinie variété de l'histoire des hommes?

In this volume leading scholars from around the world discuss the contribution of medieval church law to the origins of the western legal tradition. Subdivided into four topical categories, the essays cover the entire range of the history of medieval canon law from the sixth to the sixteenth century.

This latest collection of studies by James Brundage deals with the emergence of the profession of canon law and with aspects of its practice in the period from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Substantial numbers of lawyers systematically trained in canon law first appeared in Western Europe during the second half of the 12th, century and in the 13th they began to dominate the hierarchy of the Western church. By 1250 canon law had grown into something more than a profitable occupation: it had become a recognizable profession in the strict meaning of the term as it is still used today. University law faculties trained aspiring canonists in the mysteries of their craft and put them through intellectually demanding exercises that terminated in a formal examination before they received their degrees. Judges in church courts formally admitted them to practice after verifying their educational qualifications and administered prescribed rules of conduct. Particular topics are the canonists' system of legal ethics, the education and training of canon lawyers in university law faculties, and some fundamental features of the professional practice of canon law, both in medieval Europe and in the crusading states of the Levant.

Though it may not be immediately obvious why articles on topics from such distantly removed areas of western Europe - the Iberian peninsula and southern Italy - should appear in the same volume (the fourth collection by Roger Reynolds), the materials covered illustrate that they are indeed closely related, both in their differences and their similarities. Both peninsulas had their own indigenous liturgies and music (Old Spanish and Beneventan), distinctive written scripts (Visigothic and Beneventan), and legal and theological traditions, and repeatedly these worked their influence on other areas of western Europe. Although there were frequent attempts by the papacy and secular rulers from the 9th to the 13th century to suppress these distinctive traditions in both areas, elements of these nonetheless survived well into the 16th century and beyond. Despite the differences in these traditions, the articles in this volume also demonstrate through manuscript evidence the continued exchange of the distinctive customs between the Iberian peninsula and southern Italian cultures from the very early Middle Ages through the 12th century.

Like specialists in other fields in humanities and social sciences, medievalists have begun to investigate and write about sex and related topics such as courtship, concubinage, divorce, marriage, prostitution, and child rearing. The scholarship in this significant volume asserts that sexual conduct formed a crucial role in the lives, thoughts, hopes and fears both of individuals and of the institutions that they created in the middle ages. The absorbing subject of sexuality in the Middle Ages is examined in 19 original articles written specifically for this "Handbook" by the major authorities in their scholarly specialties. The study of medieval sexuality poses problems for the researcher: indices in standard sources rarely refer to sexual topics, and standard secondary sources often ignore the material or say little about it. Yet a vast amount of research is available, and the information is accessible to the student who knows where to look and what to look for. This volume is a valuable guide to the material and an indicator of what subjects are likely to yield fresh scholarly rewards.

Dante Fedele’s new work of reference reveals the medieval foundations of international law through a comprehensive study of a key figure of late medieval legal scholarship: Baldus de Ubaldis (1327-1400).

This fourth collection by Professor André Gouron presents a set of twenty studies on jurisprudence, jurists and legal practice in the 12th and 13th centuries. The focus is on the schools and traditions of Bologna and in France, but the coverage includes canon, Roman and customary law. The first part deals with theories diffused by the jurists of Bologna and France and the literary genres in which they expressed these theories, particularly on questions of presumptions, proof, and illicit conditions. In the second section the author looks at some of the persons involved in the juridical renaissance of this period, and at some of the effects of the legal doctrines being taught on royal legislation, procedure, the fiscal system, and urban autonomy. Ce volume - le quatrième de l’auteur dans cette collection - réunit vingt articles du professeur Gouron. Onze de ces articles forment une première partie, consacrée aux théories diffusées par les juristes de Bologne ou de France et aux genres littéraires à travers lesquels s’expriment ces théories, notamment en matière de présomptions, de preuve par témoins ou de conditions illicites. La seconde partie du volume rassemble neuf articles qui traitent de divers acteurs, célèbres ou obscurs, de la renaissance juridique, ainsi que des effets des doctrines enseignées par les romanistes et les canonistes sur la législation royale, la procédure, le système fiscal et l’autonomie urbaine.

This book contains essays written over the past 25 years about medieval urban communities and about the loyalties and beliefs of medieval lay people in general. Most writing about medieval religious, political, legal, and social ideas starts from treatises written by academics and assumes that ideas trickled down from the clergy to the laity. Susan Reynolds, whether writing about the struggles for liberty of small English towns, the national solidarities of the Anglo-Saxons, or the capacity of medieval peasants to formulate their own attitudes to religion, rejects this assumption. She suggests that the medieval laity had ideas of their own that deserve to be taken seriously.

The twenty studies collected in this volume focus on the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world. The method leads from technical investigations on William Durant the Younger (ca. 1266-1330) and Hermann Conring (1606-1681) through reflection on the nature of historical knowledge to a break with historicism, an affirmation of anachronism, and a broad perspective on the history of Europe. The introduction explains when and why these studies were written, and places them in the context of contemporary historical thinking by drawing on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. This book will appeal to historians with an interest in historical theory, historians of late medieval and early modern Europe, and students looking for the meaning of history.

This monograph addresses the history of canon law in Western Europe between ca. 1000 and ca. 1150, specifically the collections compiled and the councils held in that time. The main part consists of an analysis of all major collections, taking into account their formal and material sources, the social and political context of their origin, the manuscript transmission, and their reception more generally. As most collections are not available in reliable editions, a considerable part of the discussion involves the analysis of medieval manuscripts. Specialized research is available for many but not all these works, but tends to be scattered across miscellaneous publications in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish; one purpose of the book is thus to provide relatively uniform, up-to-date accounts of all major collections of the period. At the same time, the book argues that the collections are much more directly influenced by the social milieux from which they emerged, and that more groups were involved in the development of high medieval canon law than it has previously been thought. In particular, the book seeks to replace the still widely held belief that the development of canon law in the century before Gratian's Decretum (ca. 1140) was largely driven by the Reform papacy. Instead, it is crucial to take into account the contribution of bishops, monks, and other groups with often conflicting interests. Put briefly, local needs and conflicts played a considerably more important role than central (papal) 'reform', on which older scholarship has largely focused.