Sexual Behavior and the Early Medieval Canonical Collections
By the early tenth century the Western Church’s accumulated body of behavioral and doctrinal regulations had grown unmanageably large. The thousands of canons adopted by synods and councils, together with the decrees and rulings of popes and bishops, the declarations of patristic writers and other spiritual authorities, and a considerable body of royal and imperial law dealing with religious and moral matters, all comprised what was vaguely thought of as canon law.
The very bulk of these sources meant that a priest, bishop, or judge who sought an authoritative answer to nearly any problem arising in church administration or in ecclesiastical disputes faced a formidable task. A conscientious prelate who sought guidance in dealing with nearly any common problem—such as, for example, marital incest, adultery, rape, prostitution, property rights of concubines, or grounds for divorce—needed a large library. He had to resign himself (or more likely his clerks) to hours of tedious searching in order to unearth the relevant conciliar enactments, papal decrees, or patristic dicta. Information retrieval, to call it by its twentieth-century name, posed major and often insoluble problems for pastors, Church administrators, and ecclesiastical courts.In response to the need for authoritative information about ecclesiastical policy and precedents, learned Churchmen had begun centuries earlier to compile guides and anthologies of canon law. The Didache or Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles, the earliest surviving example of such a handbook, dates from
?“Nicholas I, Letter to the Bulgarians, c. 75, 13 Nov. 866 (JE 2812), in PL 119:1008. Ninth-eentury councils also worried about the effect of penitentials upon Christian morals and councils at Chalons and Paris condemned their use; see Payer, Sex and the Penitentials, pp.
57-59.the end of the first or the beginning of the second century. The growth of Church law since that time had soon outdated brief and primitive summaries such as the Didache, however, and by the fifth century more ample digests and anthologies were in circulation.
The most influential canonical manuals of that age included the Diony- siana, prepared at Rome in the fifth century by a monk, Denis the Little, and the Spanish Collection, or Hispana, put together probably at Seville in the sixth or seventh century.197 In France the Collectio vetus Gallica, written between 585 and 626/27, also enjoyed a degree of popularity.198 These collections, though much fuller and more comprehensive than the earlier ones, remained sketchy and unsystematic; hence many authorities found them unsatisfactory. In 774 Pope Hadrian I (772-795) sent to Charlemagne a revised version of the Dionysiana, supplemented by more recent rulings and conflated with material from other canonical collections, as an authoritative guide to canon law for the Carolingian empire. The Hadriana, as this compilation was called, was itself outdated within a few years by fresh legislation.199 Accordingly a
197Foumier and Le Bras, Histoire des collections Canoniques 1:1-126; Gerard Fran- sen, Les collections Canoniques, Typologie des sources du moyen age occidental, fasc. 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1973), pp. 12-19; Stickler, Historiaiuriscanonici, pp. 22-105; Van Hove, Prolegomena, pp. 122-34, i5°-θ2> 265-91; Garcia y Garcia, Historia del derecho canonico 1:43-48, 160-91, 283-94; Jean Gaudemet, Les sources du droit de Teglise en occident du He au VHe siecle (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1985), ρρ. 134-37, 155-61; Michael Richter, “Dionysius Exiguus,” in Theologische Realenzyklopddie, ed. Gerhard Krause, et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1977- ; in progress; cited hereafter as TRE) 9:1-4. The Dionysiana circulated in three versions.
The earliest has been edited by Adolf Strewe in Die Kanonessammlung des Dionysius Exiguus in der ersten Redaktion (Berlin: W. De Gruyter, 1931); the second can be found in PL 67:139-316; the third version apparently no longer exists, save for its preface, edited in Friedrich Maassen, Geschichte der Quellen und Literatur des canonischen Rechts im Ahendlande (Graz: Leuschner & Lubensky, 1870; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1956), PP∙ 9θ3-θ4∙ The Hispana exists in two principal versions, with numerous variants. The Hispana chronologica is printed in PL 84:93-848, although the edition is not very reliable; no good edition of the Hispana systematica exists either, but there are excerpts from this version in PL 84:25-92. A critical edition is being prepared by Gonzalo Martinez Diez; see La coleccion canonica Hispana, Monumenta Hispaniae sacrae, vol. 1 (Madrid, Barcelona: Consejo superior de Investigaciones cientfficas, Instituto Enrique Florez, 1966- ; in progress).198Hubert Mordek, Kirchenrecht und Reform im Frankenreich: Die Collectio υetus gallica, die dlteste Kanonessammlung des frdnkischen Gallien, Beitrage zur Geschichte und Quellen des Mittelalters, vol. 1 (Berlin, New York: W. De Gruyter, 1975) includes a critical edition of this work, which was previously known as the Collectio Andegavensis.
199No modern edition of the Hadriana exists; the best available is an edition of the mixed version known as the Dionysio-Hadriana by Franςois Pithou, Codex canonum vetus ecclesiae Romanae (Paris: E typographia Petri Chevailer, 1609). A conflated version of the Hispana and the Hadriana was prepared about 800 and is known as the Dacheriana, after its first modern editor, Luc d’Achery; it has been mentioned previ- stream of new canonical collections began to appear in the early ninth century.[675] [676]
Among the new compendia was a group of influential but puzzling collections that consisted largely of forged papal letters and spurious conciliar canons.
The largest and most influential of these collections is now known as the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. Although the collection circulated under the name of St. Isidore of Seville (ca. 560-636), who may in fact have been responsible for a now-lost early version of the Hispana, the Pseudo-Isidorian collection dates from the years between 847 and 852. Pseudo-Isidore confected his work somewhere in northern France, possibly in the ecclesiastical province of Tours, or perhaps somewhere around Reims—tantalizing clues point to ties with both regions, but it has not been possible to pinpoint its origin.[677] The collection circulated widely and was often copied; at least eighty-seven surviving manuscripts of the whole work, which is bulky and hence costly to produce, testify to its continuing use throughout the Middle Ages.[678] [679]In addition to the work of Pseudo-Isidore, two other compilations of forged laws appeared at roughly the same time: the Capitula Angilramni and the Capitularies of Benedictus Levit a. 2'a The interests of the forgers who produced these anthologies centered mainly on problems of ecclesiology, Church administration, and jurisdictional rights. They had little to say about sexual behavior, marriage, and related topics. Mixed in with the spurious material, however, was a sizeable body of genuine papal letters, conciliar canons, and royal capitularies. Part of this authentic law dealt with marriage and sexual problems. The genuine canons dealing with sexual matters in Pseudo-Isidore s work seem to have been selected to emphasize the importance of clerical celibacy and the punishments to be inflicted upon clerics who failed to practice sexual continence. [680] Both genuine and forged portions of the collection mandated the practice of periodic marital abstinence from intercourse. In general the author(s) of Pseudo-Isidore made it plain that marriage should be both monogamous and indissoluble.[681] Still, the forged decretals added little to the development of sexual doctrine.
Most of the major genuine canonical collections of the ninth and tenth centuries shared with the forged decretals a relative disinterest in sexual problems. The leading Italian canonical collection, the Collectio Anselmo dedicata (ca. 882), paid only passing attention to marriage and sexuality; a similar cursory treatment of these topics characterized the principal French collection by Abbo OfFleury.[682]
In contrast, the major German canonist of the early tenth century, Abbot Regino of Priim, who compiled his Two Books Concerning, Synodal Cases and Ecclesiastical Discipline about go6, devoted the greater part of his second book to sexual matters.[683] Reginos work includes numerous excerpts drawn from the penitentials on the subject of marital chastity and periodic abstinence from sexual relations.[684] Reginos treatment of divorce was also substantial. His selection of material makes it clear that he considered marriage a lifelong commitment and wished to discourage remarriage following divorce.[685] Regino restricted the grounds for divorce to adultery and impotence and fiercely castigated informal separations without judicial process.21" Regino was nearly unique among the canonists of his age in his attention to the reconciliation of separated couples and methods for bringing them back to marital harmony.[686] [687] Regino was a jurist of wider learning than most of his contemporaries. His discussion of marital and sexual problems relics not only on the conventional legal sources that other canonists of his period used—selected conciliar canons, papal letters, extracts from penitentials, and citations from patristic authorities, such as St. Augustine—but also refers with considerable frequency to Roman law, notably the Sententiae of Paulus and the Theodosian Code.[688] While Reginos discussion of adultery and fornication was fairly conventional,[689] he paid greater attention than was usual in his period to rape and the abduction of heiresses. His treatment of rape relies heavily on earlier conciliar rulings, but also draws upon the capitularies, as well as on papal letters.[690] Regino gave special prominence, as well, to homosexual offenses and masturbation, topics that earlier canonical writers took up briefly, if at all.[691] His concern for these issues doubtless reflects the influence of the penitentials, from which he drew heavily for this portion of his work.