c. 1140 – 1918

Gratian and canon law: the Concordance of Discordant Canons (c. 1140)

Shelley: canon law served the Church as civil law served the secular state: it defined the rights, duties and authority of all people and priests and was applied in all church courts. Around 1140 Gratian, a monk of the monastery of St Felix in Bologna, brought together earlier collections of church law in the Concordance of Discordant Canons, which became the sole manual for teachers and judges and then the basis of the Corpus of Canon Law; the code remained in force until its revision in 1918. Law gave the papacy a rational legal basis that the medieval state lacked, but, in Shelley’s assessment, it also expressed a thirst for control over the life of every layman.

Key points

• Shelley: the University of Bologna became a centre of Roman and canon law study; about 1140 Gratian published the Concordance of Discordant Canons by topic. His work became the basis of the Corpus of Canon Law; by the fourteenth century Rome had an authoritative law code that stood until 1918. Canon law intervened in wars and care for widows, set fasts and required confession and communion at least once a year; it set conditions of marriage and excommunication, bishops and pope were judged by it; it reached all, “from plowman to prince”. The drive to control every side of life is devotion to the law’s letter, forgetting that God meant freedom as forerunner of true faith. Canon law gave the pope a rational legal basis that the state lacked; Innocent III for three decades acted as “vicar of Christ”

People

• Gratian
• Innocent III

Place

Bologna, the Roman Church