The construction of auctoritas in Gratian's Decretum: the role of tradition and the auctor in a 12th century legal text

Auteurs

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2316-9141.rh.2022.181491

Mots-clés :

Authority, Medieval canon law, Gratian, Authorship, Legal texts

Résumé

This paper discusses the construction of authority in the 12th century using a specific case, that of Gratian’s Decretum, a legal manual compiled around 1140 in Western Europe. Through a methodology of intertextual analysis, this article combines theoretical work from major authors and primary sources to advance an explanation on how authority can be understood during the central Middle Ages in legal texts and how it comes from an articulation between tradition and originality. Furthermore, we highlight how the intersections between innovation and tradition in the Decretum make it possible for us to consider Gratian as an auctor. From this analysis, we extrapolate a broader conclusion about how legal texts in the 12th and 13th centuries used and then recreated a notion of authority that came to include the idea of the author who, in his turn, became an authority himself.

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Biographie de l'auteur

  • Carolina Gual Silva, Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro

    PhD in Cultural History from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp). Associate Professor of Medieval History in the History Department, Institute of Human and Social Sciences at the Universidade Federal Rual do Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ), Seropédica, RJ, Brasil.

Références

Primary sources:

GRATIAN. Decretum, Available at:

<https://geschichte.digitale-sammlungen.de//decretum-gratiani/online/angebot> Access on 10/01/2021.

GRATIAN. Decretum Gratiani, first recension, edition in progress, WINROTH, Anders (ed.) Available at: gratian.org. Access on 8/12/2020.

GRATIAN. Treatise on Laws. Washington: Catholic University of America, 1993.

Secondary sources:

ALLEN, Graham. Intertextuality. London-New York: Routledge, 2000.

BOLTON, Brenda; MEEK, Charles. Aspects of Power and Authority in the Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007.

BRUNDAGE, James. Medieval Canon Law. London and New York: Longman, 1995.

BRUNDAGE, James, A. The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession. Canonists, Civilians, and Courts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

CHRISTENSEN, Katherine. Introduction. In: GRATIAN. Treatise on Laws. Washington: Catholic University of America, 1993.

DEANSLY, Margaret, A History of the Medieval Church 590-1500. London & NY:

Routledge, 1994.

GAUDEMET, Jean. Contribution à l’étude de la loi dans la doctrine canonique du XIIe siècle. La Formation du droit canonique médieval. London: Variorum, 1980.

HARTMANN, Wilfried; PENNINGTON, Kenneth. (eds.). The History of Medieval Canon law in the Classic Period, 1140-1234: from Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008.

HASKINS, Charles Homer. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

KUTTNER, Stephan. On ‘auctoritas’ in the writing of medieval canonists: the vocabulary of Gratian. Studies in the History of Medieval Canon Law. London: Variorum, 1990.

LANDAU, Peter. “Gratian and the Decretum Gratiani”. In: HARTMANN, W.; PENNINGTON, K. (ed.). The History of Medieval Canon law in the Classic Period, 1140-1234: from Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008.

MERRIAM-WEBSTER Online Dictionary. “Authority”. Disponível em: <https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/authority>. Acesso em 25/01/2021.

MERTON, Robert. On the Shoulders of Giants. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

MINNIS, Alastair. Medieval Theory of Authorship. Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2nd edition, 2010.

MIRAMON, Charles de. La mutation de l’enseignement du Décret de Gratien à Bologne à la fin du XIIe siècle. DEMOULIN-AUZARY, Florence; LAURENT-BONNE, Nicolas; ROUMY, Frank (Orgs.). Proceedings of the Fifteenth Congress of Medieval Canon Law. Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticani, forthcoming.

MÜLLER, Wolfgang. P.; SOMMAR, Mary E. (ed.), Medieval Church Law and the Origins of the Western Legal Tradition: a tribute to Kenneth Pennington. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006.

NOONAN, John T. Gratian slept here: the changing identity of father of systematic study of canon law. Traditio. vol. 35, 1979.

PENNINGTON, Kenneth. Western legal collections in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In: BEREND, Nora; HAMEAU-MASSET, Youna; NEPO-PEKELMAN, Capucine; TOLAN, John. Religious minorities in Christian, Jewish and Muslim Law (5th-15th centuries). Turnhout: Brepols, 2017.

SILVA, Carolina Gual. Sobre direito e normas na Idade Média: do pluralismo à multinormatividade. Signum. Vol. 21, n. 1, 2020.

SILVA, Carolina Gual. Tithes and equity: where Canon Law meets Theology. DEMOULIN-AUZARY, Florence; LAURENT-BONNE, Nicolas; ROUMY, Frank (Orgs.). Proceedings of the Fifteenth Congress of Medieval Canon Law. Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticani, forthcoming.

WINROTH, Anders. The Making of Gratian’s Decretum. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

ZIOLKOWSKI, Jan. Cultures of authority. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 108, n. 4, 2009.

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Publiée

2022-01-04

Numéro

No 181 (2022)

Rubrique

Dossiê: Autoria e Autoridade entre Antigos e Modernos

Licence

Creative Commons License

Ce travail est disponible sous licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale 4.0 International.

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Comment citer

SILVA, Carolina Gual. The construction of auctoritas in Gratian’s Decretum: the role of tradition and the auctor in a 12th century legal text. Revista de História, São Paulo, n. 181, p. 1–19, 2022. DOI: 10.11606/issn.2316-9141.rh.2022.181491. Disponível em: https://revistas.usp.br/revhistoria/article/view/181491.. Acesso em: 29 mai. 2024.

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