User:Brian P. Long/medieval law

canon law

Canon law  is the system of law that the Catholic church, along with churches that derive their institutional structure from the Catholic church, use to govern their actions.

Canon law has roots that go back to the earliest centuries of the Christian church; some of the earliest documents of the church address themselves to the internal regulation of the church (the appointment of bishops and the role of priests) as well as to doctrinal matters.

Though the effective power of bishops, and the bishop of Rome in particular, to regulate the lives of Christians varied during the early middle ages, the church did make an attempt to govern its own actions and guide the lives of Christians. Irish clerics, in particular, devised a complex system of "tariffed penance," where specific sins might be absolved by carefully regulated and measured atonements, and this system soon spread to the rest of the Latin church.

This period also saw attempts by the church to codify and regularize ecclesiastical practices, and to implement these practices.

The Frankish kings, in their efforts to correct and regularize the lives of Christians in their lands, also attempted to obtain clear guidance about canon law from the bishop of Rome. Two canon law collections were particularly important in this period. The Dionysio-Hadriana was a series of precedents the Frankish kings obtained from Hadrian I in 774. The second central collection, the Pseudo-Isidorean decretals, surfaced in 850. After the Carolingian dynasty's power waned, canon law became less coherent and less effective (what about in the Empire?).

In the eleventh century, the study of Roman law began to revive in Italian schools. At the same time, the proper organization and governance of the church became of central importance to those attempting to reform the church and the papacy. Popes became increasingly preoccupied with what seemed to be irregularities and improprieties in the church, and began to issue larger numbers of letters and judicial decisions, and in doing so drew upon earlier decisions of their predecessors. At the same time, the principles of Roman law were also ready at hand.

As the legal functions of the church increased, and the study of canon law increased, legal scholars became conscious of the fact that different pontiffs had rendered diverse-- and sometimes even discordant-- judgments. The canon lawyer Gratian attempted to remedy this situation with his Concordantia discordantium canonum ("Harmony of dissonant canons"), a textbook which compiled legal precedents bearing on a particular question and attempted to resolve their differences.

At about the same time, the church became increasingly important in people's daily lives. The church came to preoccupy itself with marriage, with sexual behavior, with ensuring that Christians confessed and received communion on a yearly basis. Marriage, for example, was regulated ever more carefully: the papacy sought to ensure that marriage did not occur within a certain degree of relatedness, and to oversee the granting of divorces. These restrictions could be circumvented with papal dispensations; therefore, the papacy became increasingly active and its judicial apparatus increasingly substantial.

The law of the church did not stand still after Gratian, however, and canon lawyers continued to collect

ius commune

civil law