Archdeacon Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85), is associated with a radical and swift change in the Roman Church. The vision of a Christendom jointly administered by emperor and clergy, the famous model advanced by Pope Gelasius II (r. 492–96), was transformed into a new order where regnum and sacerdotium occupied separate stacked spheres, with the spiritual claiming superiority. Unlike tenth-century reform movements, the later eleventh-century Roman reforms centered on the papacy. Popes assembled a curia featuring more professional officials, legates, councils, and other technologies of power. The reformed Church cultivated trained lawyers and sympathetic lay leaders. It has been credited with launching a legal “big bang,” the invention of propaganda, the creation of a semi-institutionalized public sphere, and the formation of a persecuting society. Closer examination of institutional changes helps reveal the achievements and limits of this “new world order.”

This chapter articulates, first, the power of Catholic popes to punish the sin of clerical sexual abuse. It examines their ability to use canon law, executive orders, and other religious means to reorganize the Church’s infrastructure and reform the governance of its hierarchy and priests. On a second level, it analyzes the popes’ limited role in sanctioning the crime of clerical sexual abuse. It examines the historical right of popes to punish its clerical personnel, protect its privacy, and maintain its sphere of religious authority, matters that have been challenged by the imposition of criminal law, civil lawsuits, and state investigations. Finally, it concludes that papal governance on clerical sexual abuse has often been ineffective, that social and management problems still exist, and that they will impact the papacy’s future moral quandary in Catholic Church–state relations

This chapter traces the conflicting history of the relationship between the popes and the Inquisitions from the early modern period onwards, with a prologue on the late Middle Ages. Its scope embraces the Roman Holy Office alongside the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, with their offshoots in the colonies, since to suppose that these latter were institutions entirely dependent on the Iberian monarchies is over-simplistic. The Roman court and the Index are treated more extensively, especially since the Holy Office was considered the most eminent Congregation of the Curia. The text also seeks to determine the extent to which the Roman Inquisition impinged on the autonomy of the popes or the development of Catholic dogma and orthopraxy on a global scale. Lastly, it looks at the later evolution of the Holy Office up until its mutation into the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the twentieth century.

This chapter sets out the history of the process of electing the pope, including the development of voting rules, procedures, sites of election, and a wider electoral culture. The basic format for the modern papal election evolved gradually over a period from 1059 to the 1400s, with the first “conclaves” taking place in the mid-thirteenth century. In contrast to papal elections, papal resignations have been rare, with most occurring during the first Christian millennium. The question of how a pope might relinquish office nevertheless still interested canonists until long after this date, and rules about how popes might resign were incorporated into the twentieth-century codes of canon law even before Benedict XVI dramatically invoked them in 2013.

Did the popes, through the medium of decretals, make law or not? Against a long-established tradition expressed forcefully by Walther Ullmann, Harold Berman, and many others, this chapter argues that the legal authority of the medieval papacy, manifested most spectacularly in the issue of thousands of decretal letters, represented not legislation but jurisdiction; that it was generated by the demands of appellants and consultants from across the whole of the Latin Church, from Trondheim (Norway) to Esztergom (Hungary) and Palermo (Sicily); and that the impetus to compile collections of these papal decisions began not in Rome but in the regions, for use in episcopal courts and in the nascent universities where canon law was studied. A selection of rescripts (replies to judicial appeals) and consultations (answers to questions) offers a fascinating insight into these dynamic processes, which helped to shape the development of European law.

This chapter argues that in the early medieval period, Catholic law both reflected and reinforced a largely “horizontal” Church structure, in which bishops played a central role, often in close engagement with secular lords and rulers. The first part of the chapter surveys the types of existing evidence for early medieval Church law, from the Carolingians up until the Gregorian Reform of circa 1050. The second part focuses on continuities between the Carolingian reforms and the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Recent scholarship has increasingly argued that the Carolingian reforms did not end with the fragmentation of the Carolingian empire. Building on that work, this chapter describes three examples of continuities between the Carolingian and Ottonian periods.

In large part the role of the papacy as a legislative institution and a court system was its most significant contribution to Western jurisprudence. This chapter traces the long evolution of the papacy’s legal and legislative development from the late antique to the sixteenth century. It outlines the papacy’s influence over the first law schools in Europe, and the importance of the law schools in cultivating, teaching, and interpreting papal law.

The College of Cardinals is a key constituent organ within the papacy, its members being charged with electing the pope and with advising him. Cardinals were originally priests and deacons who assisted the pope in his liturgical and charitable duties around the city of Rome during the first millennium and also the Bishops of Rome’s neighboring “suburbicarian” dioceses. These three orders of clerics cohered into a single College during the Gregorian reform of the eleventh and twelfth centuries: their status and role in papal affairs has waxed and waned in the centuries since. Today the College is more diverse and representative of global Catholicism than at any point in the past. However, it is also a larger and a less cohesive body, whose members are less familiar with each other – or with the pope – than their predecessors were.

The relations between medieval and early modern Jews and the popes rested on consistently applied canonical and Roman law principles, alongside Pauline theology, which was itself bifurcated. These principles were fundamentally restrictive, and the restrictions became tighter over time. To speak of a mild early Middle Ages, driven by Augustinian principles, which turned radically hostile after the First Crusade, is a distortion. Nobody mentioned Augustine until Innocent III. There were forced conversions even in the early Middle Ages. Similarly, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was not a turning point, but a culmination. Subsequent attacks on literature were new, but not papally initiated. Beginning with Benedict XIII in 1415, a move to press conversion – without ignoring old limits, theoretically – began to grow, which culminated in Paul IV’s foundation of the Roman ghetto in 1555, intended be a cauldron of conversion achieved through repression. The policy failed.

This chapter offers an analysis of toleration as legal practice and administrative discretion, which finds its origins in canon law. This chapter articulates common frames of reference to toleration: a qualification of evil, the preservation of outward unity and social trust, economic benefit, and the duty to protect public peace and order – all interests that could inform a particular decision on whether to tolerate certain practices. Toleration entailed a spectrum of practices of coexistence, which may be characterised as incorporation through marginalisation. This marginalisation commonly had a spatial aspect. The visibility of minority religiosity tended to be constrained through practices of segregation or specific rules about the expression of identity in public. Moreover, toleration was intended to be temporary, and often appeared to be tentative, and legally fragile.

Chapter 4 uses chronicles, hagiographies, ekphraseis and polemical treatises to discuss clerical hunting in Romanía. Prohibitions against clerical hunting had existed for Western men since Late Antiquity, but there is not enough evidence to suggest that Romanía followed the same pattern. In the Eastern Roman context, narratives of clerical hunting did not put the emphasis on differences between secular and religious men, and non-participation did not entail the loss of masculine capital. Rather, the focus was on human/animal interactions and the need to avoid overindulgence, and the emphasis was the same whether the person involved was an emperor or a cleric. The animals themselves also had an important role to play: they were not simply seen as prey to be dominated by the manly man but could act as co-creators of the skills necessary for the hunt, leaving their traces on their co-hunters’ subjectivity. At the same time, the malleability of Eastern Roman ideas about which animal lives were worth preserving allowed authors to strategically unify all men against the animal Other or to distinguish between different types of men, creating in the process hierarchies of masculinities.

Chapter 5 investigates the impact of prohibitions against fighting on clerical masculinity. It examines two clerical groups: those who acted violently but wished to remain clerics and those who abandoned their religious status. Both Western and Eastern canon law forbade clerical fighting, with an important difference: the Western Church put emphasis on bloodshed; the Eastern was more concerned with the clerics’ state of mind and the avoidance of anger. This meant that, in Romanía, outside of strict prohibitions against killing, there was more of an overlap in the exercise of moderate force. The situation was different for clerics who abandoned religious life. Eastern canon law insisted on strict religious/secular distinctions through a focus on vestments, but authors of histories accepted such shifts with little comment. In Romanía, religious status – and, as a result, one’s gender – could prove to be rather fluid throughout one’s life. The chapter ends with a case study focusing on Michael Chōniatēs’ Life of Niketas, the eunuch bishop of Chonai, who fought visible and invisible enemies. His example offers a limit case for how an ecclesiastic could show his masculinity while maintaining an attitude that was considered acceptable, and even ideal, for a clerical man within religious circles.

Chapter 4 is the first of three chapters laying a basic foundation in German law and politics. The chapter focuses on German legal history, including a deep history dating from the Roman encounters with the German barbarians up to the codification movement in the nineteenth century. The deep history shows how Germanic customary law, Roman Law, and Canon Law mixed to form modern German law. The chapter then shows how the process of development proceeded differently for private law (leading to the great codification of private law) and public law (with a tumultuous process of constitutionalization).

Canon law rules of marriage became the legal means for policing forbidden sex in Iceland during the Middle Ages. These rules were adapted to various needs: enforcing morality, encouraging adherence to Christian sexual norms, and managing inheritance practices and property rights. This chapter explores sex in Iceland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by focusing on legal regulation, the archbishops’ and bishops’ statutes, and selected court cases. In all the Nordic countries the regulation of sexuality was highly influenced by canon law, but a study of sex in Iceland needs to be understood in relation to the special character of the society. It was highly literate, because of Christianity, but decentralized, with no towns and a distant royal administration. There had never been a strong executive authority in Iceland, and its absence seems to have encouraged widespread interest in documenting personal disputes and property rights. This makes Iceland special. Written documents and historical writing were mostly kept at the farms of leading families, for use in disputes over property rights in the local courts. This differs from more urbanized societies elsewhere in Europe.

The introduction makes a case for returning to the topic of Boccaccio’s realism through the lens of law and rhetoric. Boccaccio’s Decameron is not just realistic from a stylistic perspective, a mark of the authors modernity. Rather, the work is itself a critical examination of the uses and abuses of realism. This examination of everyday, social mimesis occurs most trenchantly in the Decameron’s numerous trial scenes. Accordingly, this introduction argues that we should shift focus from Boccaccio the expert canonist to Boccaccio the astute observer of procedural law. It argues, further, that that the difference between Dante’s and Boccaccio’s realism can be seen as a legal-procedural difference. Dante prefers in inquisitorial poetics aimed at uncovering hidden truths while Boccaccio’s realism is dialectical and accusatorial.