The reception and authority of conciliar canons in the later-twelfth century: Alexander III's 1179 Lateran canons and their manuscript context

• Autores: Danica Summerlin
• Localización: Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte.: Kanonistische Abteilung, ISSN 0323-4142, Vol. 131, 2014, págs. 112-131
• Idioma: alemán
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• Resumen

  • Conciliar canons play a significant role in the 'new law' as preserved in the Gregorian Decretales and their immediate predecessors. As a result, they are presented in modern scholarly narratives as legislative texts possessing an overarching and broadly accepted authority that set them apart from other contemporary legal texts, with the implication that they were readily available to all of Christendom in a single, broadly similar version. Analysing the manuscript tradition of the 1179 Lateran canons, however, points away from such a simplistic narrative. The presence of major differences between the various traditions, including the number and order of the canons preserved and in some cases even their texts, suggests that the conciliar canons were as susceptible to alteration through the vagaries of their transmission as any other text.lt therefore questions how far the use of these decrees in practice supports the idea that they were perceived by contemporaries as being representative of an overwhelming papal superiority that guaranteed their dissemination.