D'Avray, David;
(2017)
Stages of Papal Law.
Journal of the British Academy
, 5
pp. 37-59.
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Abstract
Papal law is known from the late 4th century (Siricius). There was demand for decretals and they were collected in private collections from the 5th century on. Charlemagne’s Admonitio generalis made papal legislation even better known and the Pseudo-Isidorian collections brought genuine decretals also to the wide audience that these partly forged collections reached. The papal reforms from the 11th century on gave rise to a new burst of papal decretals, and collections of them, culminating in the Liber Extra of 1234. The Council of Trent opened a new phase. The ‘Congregation of the Council’, set up to apply Trent’s non-dogmatic decrees, became a new source of papal law. Finally, in 1917, nearly a millennium and a half of papal law was codified by Cardinal Gasparri within two covers. Papal law was to a great extent ‘demand-driven’, which requires explanation. The theory proposed here is that Catholic Christianity was composed of a multitude of subsystems, not planned centrally and each with an evolving life of its own. Subsystems frequently interfered with the life of other subsystems, creating new entanglements. This constantly renewed complexity had the function (though not the purpose) of creating and recreating demand for papal law to sort out the entanglements between subsystems. For various reasons other religious systems have not generated the same demand: because the state plays a ‘papal’ role, or because the units are small, discrete and simple, or thanks to a clear simple blueprint, or because of conservatism combined with a tolerance of some inconsistency. It is difficult to find a religious system with the same complexity problems combined with a strong sense that the whole needed to remain united without internal contradictions.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Stages of Papal Law |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/jou... |
| Additional information: | © The British Academy 2017. The Journal of the British Academy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. |
| Keywords: | Siricius, Pseudo-Isidorean collections, Gratian, decretals, Liber Extra, Apostolic Penitentiary, Congregation of the Council, other early modern papal law, Gasparri, complexity, Trent. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1544254 |
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