Canonical Collections of the Early Middle Ages (ca. 400-1140)


Book Description

Contains a bibliographical survey of the chronological and systematic canonical collections in the Latin West from the beginnings of Christianity to Gratian's Decretum (ca. 1140). Dr. Kéry not only has compiled a catalogue of early medieval canonistic manuscripts, but has included valuable information about them. For each collection she has described its type and contents, the time and place of compilation, and, when, possible, its author. Full bibliographies have been provided for each collection, arranged in chronological order. Scholars will find her work particularly useful since she has also noted where scholars have differed and where their opinions may be found. Special attention has been paid to the numerous recensions of the collections. She has given a separate entry for important recensions and has lists of fragments and abbreviated forms of the collections.










Making Laws for a Christian Society


Book Description

This is the first comprehensive study of the contribution that texts from Britain and Ireland made to the development of canon law in early medieval Europe. The book concentrates on a group of insular texts of church law—chief among them the Irish Hibernensis—tracing their evolution through mutual influence, their debt to late antique traditions from around the Mediterranean, their reception (and occasional rejection) by clerics in continental Europe, their fusion with continental texts, and their eventual impact on the formation of a European canonical tradition. Canonical collections, penitentials, and miscellanies of church law, and royal legislation, are all shown to have been 'living texts', which were continually reshaped through a process of trial and error that eventually gave rise to a more stable and more coherent body of church laws. Through a meticulous text-critical study Roy Flechner argues that the growth of church law in Europe owes as much to a serendipitous 'conversation' between texts as it does to any deliberate plan overseen by bishops and popes.
















The Life of Saint Patrick and his Place in History


Book Description

PERHAPS the scope of this book will be best understood if I explain that the subject attracted my attention, not as an important crisis in the history of Ireland, but, in the first place, as an appendix to the history of the Roman Empire, illustrating the emanations of its influence beyond its own frontiers; and, in the second place, as a notable episode in the series of conversions which spread over northern Europe the religion which prevails to-day. Studying the work of the Slavonic apostles, Cyril and Methodius, I was led to compare them with other European missionaries, Wulfilas, for instance, and Augustine, Boniface, and Otto of Bamberg. When I came to Patrick, I found it impossible to gain any clear conception of the man and his work. The subject was wrapt in obscurity, and this obscurity was encircled by an atmosphere of controversy and conjecture. Doubts of the very existence of St. Patrick had been entertained, and other views almost amounted to the thesis that if he did exist, he was not himself, but a namesake. It was at once evident that the material had never been critically sifted, and that it would be necessary to begin at the beginning, almost as if nothing had been done, in a field where much had been written. Aeterna Press




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