13 - Carolingian Culture and Its Legacy

Summary

The three systems identified at the end of the previous chapter are all represented in the Carolingian and post-Carolingian period. The ‘inclusive’ system was renewed in the post-Carolingian period by the Decretum of Burchard. This left out a lot of the early papal jurisprudence studied in PJc.400. Secondly, produced over a century before Burchard’s Decretum and surviving in a multitude of manuscripts, there was the Pseudo-Isidorian corpus, consisting of conciliar canons and papal decretals, with boundaries closed against other genres of religious writings. It included all the papal material studied in PJc.400, but also material that would in a later period be classed as theology rather than canon law. More or less exclusive of such material, thirdly, were the Dacheriana, which included a non-trivial proportion of early papal jurisprudence, and the Dionysio-Hadriana, which was full of papal law. Charlemagne’s Admonitio generalis may be classified with them. It transmits only a modest amount of early papal jurisprudence, but this is attributed explicitly to the popes in question, and marked off, together with the conciliar canons, from the rest of his reform programme.