From the issue dated August 11, 2000
Yale Scholar, Revisiting the 'Decretum,' Opens a Window on the 12th Century
Electronic search of medieval texts yields startling discoveries on canon law
By PETER MONAGHAN
In about 1140, Gratian, an obscure cleric in Bologna, created one of the most important law books ever produced, by harmonizing the writings of early church fathers, edicts of church councils, and papal letters that he and others had gathered from the scattered sees of Europe. Generations of scholars have investigated his epochal work, called the Decretum, drawn, as scholars in arcane fields often are, by the beauty of illustrated manuscripts and the resonance of words. Indeed, the list of titles Gratian consulted reads like a spell: the Panormia and the Polycarpus, the Collection in Three Books, the Tripartita ...
The Decretum was just as influential in the Middle Ages as the now far-more-familiar writings of Aristotle. It was the capstone of efforts to formalize the study of canon law, it ushered in a European common-law framework – ius comune – that took into account both canon and ancient Roman codes. Those efforts led to crucial advancements in secular learning, from which the institution of the university emerged, in Bologna and other European centers.
Gratian did this by applying to law the "scholastic method," to compare, contrast, and reconcile canons compiled by earlier jurists. He furthered legal education, too: The abstract principles of law are still taught the way Gratian taught them: through dialectical reasoning, a conversation between tradition and reason.
If Umberto Eco were to write the tale of the medieval scholar's work and life, he might embellish the plot with intrigue in the cloisters and blunt violence in the feudal fields.
However, Anders Winroth, a Swedish assistant professor of history at Yale University,has found it unnecessary to daub Gratian's life and work with gore to capture the attention of fellow medievalists. For them, Mr. Winroth's reconstruction of Gratian's text is thrilling enough, casting, as it does, a new light on the medieval renaissance of the 12th century, and ultimately on Gratian himself.
Mr. Winroth's findings, which he explains in The Making of Gratian's Decretum (Cambridge University Press), to be published in December, have already startled the small guild of medieval canon-law scholars. He has shown that previous scholars "had not thoroughly studied the manuscript tradition of Gratian's Decretum," asserts Kenneth Pennington, a professor of history at Syracuse University and a leading expert in church law.
Mr. Winroth's own story is this: A young scholar, while in graduate school, discovers that the sprawling, muddled Decretum that has been considered the Decretum, compiled by a single Gratian, is in fact something more complicated and part of a publishing mystery that is highly revealing. The standard Decretum is, in fact, not Gratian's original document. An earlier, shorter, and much-more-coherent version exists. Embracing tasks from which even many medievalists shrink, he seeks out manuscripts of the earlier version lying, unrecognized, in little-visited medieval-manuscript collections from Paris to the Austrian Alps.
The story of Mr. Winroth's contributions appears to be less Umberto Eco than Jorge Luis Borges. In it, detection seems like metaphysics, and involves unearthing documents of uncertain provenance in libraries of grand dimension – in this case, they extend into cyberspace.
Mr. Winroth's starting point, while working on his master's and doctoral degrees at Columbia University, from 1991 to 1996, was to wonder: "How was Gratian working? Which books did he have in front of him?"
Among the compelling aspects of the Decretum for Mr. Winroth was that, like so many cultural accomplishments of past millennia, it seemed so enormous. "They didn't even have paper in the 12th century!" he exclaims. Which makes it seem a staggering feat of scholarship? "Yes, yes, it is."
The 35-year-old Mr. Winroth seems to hold in his head reams of knowledge of Gratian, much as medieval commentators must have done. He conveys it in the precise diction of a Swede speaking better English than most native speakers, as he sits in a Yale office about the size of a monk's cell, though more comfortably appointed.
He decided, he says, that first he would need to determine which parts of the many manuscripts of the Decretum really were Gratian's work. Predecessors had ascertained that some material had been interpolated by others later on.
He would need to take a bibliographic approach, because Gratian scholars had determined in the mid-1970's that the scant biography of the author was largely myth.
He set about the good old-fashioned work of poring over manuscripts, or facsimiles of them, to ascertain how various material had come to be included or excluded, when scribe after scribe painstakingly wrote manuscripts from existing texts and dictation. "There," he says, "I have really done the work in the same way as you would have done it 100 years ago."
But modern times permitted a dynamic new approach, as well: the use of electronic databases. To delve into the Decretum, any assistance is welcome. It contains 4,000 chapters, and was the first ecclesiastical-law collection to include dicta, commentaries reconciling contradictory laws. The full title of the work is Concordia discordantium canonum, The Concord of Discordant Canons.
Scholastic method, in the sense of a procedure for resolving contradictions, had begun to come into use in the late 11th century. Gratian adopted the scholastic "sic et non'' method of arranging and discussing texts with opposing arguments, pioneered by Peter Abelard, the French philosopher and theologian who died in 1144. Gratian was also inspired by the late 11th-century canonist and bishop, Ivo of Chartres, who wrote a long treatise on resolving contradictions among the canons. Gratian's reliance on those models would revolutionize law and prompt the expansion of legal schools into universities – the one in Gratian's home, Bologna, is thought to be Europe's oldest.
Gratian's Decretum became a bestseller, copied in more than 600 medieval manuscripts, not to mention later editions – a record that many 21st-century scholars could envy.
But questions about the document have persisted. Scholars long ago noticed, for example, that some manuscripts were shorter than the version considered standard; they presumed that those were merely abbreviations of the work.
More puzzling is the fact that the Decretum was, as Robert Somerville puts it, "not a tidy job."
The professor of religion and history at Columbia University explains, "If you read through the commentary with the canons, there are places where you're left scratching your head. It just doesn't apply." For example, many chapters of the Decretum begin with the rubric de eodem – meaning, "about the same thing" as the previous chapter. In fact, they are often not at all about the same thing as the chapters they follow. So some scholars have concluded that Gratian was not very good at what he did.
Mr. Winroth thought there might be another explanation for these "untidy seams," as one of the most renowned of Gratianists, Stephan Kuttner, had called the irregularities. Electronic databases at his fingertips, Mr. Winroth set out to investigate some of those contradictions in the text, steeling himself as a detective must when venturing into a fog of confusing clues. But he had some good leads.
To find all instances of a phrase like de eodem by searching manually through a vast document, even in printed versions, would pose a daunting challenge. But Mr. Winroth obtained a scanned manuscript of the Decretum from the Monumenta Germaniae Historica project, based in Munich, which had published a concordance to the work. Thanks to that, he could search for combinations of words, or for words too common to warrant indexing.
That instantly gave him 398 uses of de eodem.
He began to realize that, if he laid out the blocks of text in a manner that made the de eodem make sense – so that the text that followed them really did say much the same thing as the preceding passages – and also systematized various other conclusions, "a hypothetical, earlier version of the Decretum seemed to materialize."
That reminded Mr. Winroth that, 50 years earlier, a Polish canonist, Adam Vetulani, had speculated that some parts of the Decretum – specifically, most excerpts from Roman law sources – post-dated the rest of the book. Now, Mr. Winroth was convinced that that theory did not go far enough. He concluded that Gratian had in fact originally circulated his Decretum in a better-argued version only half the size of the known text.
He amassed a variety of evidence. But the real proof he desired would be a manuscript, or manuscripts, that contained this supposed "first recension." Again, digital databases came to his aid, including In Principio, a CD-ROM of information about thousands of medieval manuscripts and databases of manuscript holdings stored on the Internet. By identifying manuscripts shorter than the standard Decretum, he located four with the earlier, shorter recension – in libraries in Barcelona, Spain; Paris; Florence, Italy; and Admont, in the Austrian Alps. They were not unknown, but their significance was.
Contradictions and inconsistencies in the Decretum suddenly began to resolve. Mr. Winroth could also now begin to date the two versions. A reference to the Lateran Council of 1139 established that the first recension was completed after that date. And evidence from the texts of such divines as Peter Lombard demonstrated that the second version was in use by 1150. Mr. Winroth verified his theory by inspecting original manuscripts held in Florence and Paris – studying, for example, their construction, additions in margins, and interpolated leaves.
Mr. Winroth's discovery is "like cutting the Gordian knot," says Paul Freedman, a leading medievalist at Yale. "It turns out that a very tricky technical problem is ingeniously simplified."
Mr. Somerville of Columbia agrees: "Here is a situation in which, in a somewhat traditional way, but with extraordinary imagination and intelligence, someone has really opened a window on what we know about the 12th century."
Who is convinced Mr. Winroth is right? "Everyone who matters," Mr. Somerville exclaims. When Mr. Winroth first presented his findings in 1996 at a Syracuse University conference of canon-law scholars, he got handy support from Rudolf Weigand, a "grand old man" of Gratian and church law, who was a professor of canon law at the University of Wurzburg until his death in 1998. "Weigand gave a paper just after mine, where he said that I was right," says Mr. Winroth. Scholars who would otherwise have been skeptical pricked up their ears. "Weigand had spoken."
Mr. Somerville, who was Mr. Winroth's dissertation adviser at Columbia, had suggested involving Weigand, who eventually joined Mr. Winroth's dissertation panel. That connected three generations in the small Gratian community, because Mr. Somerville had himself been the protege of Stephan Kuttner at Yale in the 1960's. Mr. Kuttner died in 1996.
Mr. Winroth's finding is a breakthrough, says Mr. Freedman, because it "pinpoints the reception of Roman law, and in so doing tells you a lot about universities, the rise of reason, the rise of scholasticism." Many laws in European countries still bear the stamp of Gratian's reconciling of the two corpuses. Recently, for example, when Germany ruled on the disposition of property stolen by the Nazis, it based its decision on laws that were derived from Gratian's balancing of canon versus Roman legislation, which granted divergent rights to recipients of stolen property.
Scholars since the 16th century have tracked the sources of the Decretum, but Mr. Winroth's database searches revealed something new about the interplay between canon and Roman law. He found that the Gratian of the first recension used particular canon-law collections; the "Gratian" of the second used others.
Were there two Gratians, then? Or one, at two stages of learning?
Mr. Winroth believes there were two, and most colleagues are convinced he is right, although Mr. Weigand believed that one Gratian wrote both versions. The two scholars construe differently evidence relating to the amount of Roman law included in the two versions.
Although the Decretum has generally been known for its work of incorporating Roman law, Mr. Winroth discovered that the first version, strangely, contained little of it. How was it, he wonders, that Gratian I, as he calls the author of the first recension, did not know Roman law, while "Gratian II" did?
The Roman law that counted in the 12th-century renaissance was Justinian law, a forbidding edifice that harked back to classical authorities. Between A.D. 529 and 533, the Roman emperor promulgated his Codex constitutionum and Digesta with great fanfare, in Constantinople. But by then the empire was failing, and the daunting codes were little used. "One or two copies made it to the West," but nobody seems to have read them, says Mr. Winroth.
Then, in the 11th century, they suddenly re-emerged, in a time when expanding commerce called for better regulation.
For Mr. Winroth, then, the question was: "How can you have an obviously intelligent and enterprising man, interested in law, living in Bologna, teaching in Bologna – he must have been a teacher; nobody but a teacher could have written a book like that – and not knowing better what Roman law is, and how it works?"
He looked without success for commentaries on Roman law from Gratian's time. Instead, he found only primitive references. No one, apparently, was teaching it yet.
"What I argue is that academic teaching of Roman law started in the 1130's and 1140's" – at about the same time Gratian was writing, and later than generally believed.
"If you're a teacher of canon law in Bologna, you don't go back to school and study Roman law. I think it's the next generation that does that."
So, Mr. Winroth believes that, while Gratian I collected all the "old law" and put it into an interpretative framework, so he could teach it in an academic setting, Gratian II – a later scholar or scholars – combined that with Roman law.
"That's when you get really interesting things happening," he says, including the development of the common law of Europe.
To posit more biography of Gratian than his book hints at, Mr. Winroth suggests, is tenuous. Yes, there are tantalizing leads. Canon-law teachers in Bologna often were preparing to become bishops. One reference places a Gratian (an unusual name) in Chiusi, in northern Italy, as its bishop.
"The frustrating thing," says Mr. Winroth, "is that the Cathedral of Chiusi burnt down in the 17th century," destroying rec-ords of its bishops.
Still, he says, "there's one thing that's certain about Gratian, and that is that he was a teacher. It's so obvious from the text. He uses striking examples which the students will remember."
To encourage more discoveries about Gratian, one man or two, Mr. Winroth runs a World Wide Web site, Domus Gratiani (http://pantheon.yale.edu/~haw6/gratian.html), that acts as a gathering place for scholars like himself. Focused on often-minute details of texts and other objects, their lives, like his, resemble those of Gratian and his contemporary scholars. But they also diverge from them, thanks to the computers and other tools that spare modern textual sleuths from having to lock themselves away in monasteries.
Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
