11 - Gregory IX and the Liber Extra

Summary

Abstract

The Liber Extra, the most widely circulated collection of medieval canon law, was commissioned by Gregory IX and assembled by the Dominican Raymond of Penyafort. Gregory IX's bull of promulgation, Rex pacificus (1234), ordered that it would be the only collection used in the schools and in the courts and that no other collection was to be made without the special approval of the Apostolic See. It would be Gregory IX's major contribution to the development of medieval canon law. This chapter focuses on the genesis and intentions behind the Liber Extra, the pre-Gregorian sources for the compilation, and Gregory IX's own contribution, before offering suggestions for the path of future scholarship concerning the Liber Extra and Gregory's own legal accomplishments.

Keywords: Canon Law, Liber Extra, Raymond of Penyafort, Decretals, Jurists

The legate's patience was wearing thin. Amidst the protestations of the assembled English prelates, he gestured from his position near the high altar of St. Paul's Cathedral to his assistant. Master Attho rose from his seat and took up an imposing codex set out among documents prominently bearing the papal seal of Gregory IX. Opening the volume and turning the leaves, Attho ran his finger down the column of tightly packed capitula until he arrived at the end of the section on the legatine office. The room now quieted down as Attho read out the last entry in the title, an item written by Gregory himself: ‘we wish no one to doubt but that the statutes of legates of the Apostolic See, promulgated in the province in which they are conducting their mission, shall endure as perpetual even after they depart from that province’. The English prelates had already demanded a delay for a closed meeting to review the legate's proposed statutes, among which they had found, much to their consternation, one reaffirming the Fourth Lateran Council's ban on holding plural benefices. They now realized they could no longer pre-emptively undercut the legate's authority. Otto Candidus, cardinal deacon of S. Nicola in Carcere Tulliano, and a veteran of legatine missions in Lombardy, Livonia, France and Germany, could finally get down to the business of reform in London.

Matthew of Paris, who left us this account of Otto's November 1237 council in London, identifies the book from which Magister Attho read the decree on legatine statutes only as Pope Gregory IX's liber autenticum, scilicet register.