Looking back on the period between the fall of the empire in the West and Charlemagne, the following typology is discernible: The style of jurisprudence developed by Siricius and Innocent I, and in letters of Leo I and Gelasius I that echoed their themes, was carried on by the Dionysiana and (rearranged thematically) the Concordia Cresconius. This tradition remained a major influence. One may call it the legal type. A second type includes the first and also confines itself to conciliar canons and papal letters, but adds a good deal of Christology, through letters of Leo I about the ‘one nature’ theory; in this type, the Christological content makes the collection as a whole less like ‘positive’ law, more like a general collection of all kinds of papal letters, a hybrid of law and theology (as later understood). It could be called the hybrid type. The Hispana is a prime example. In the third type papal law is present but pushed into the background by much material, Patristic and from penitentials, that is neither obviously legal nor papal. The Hibernensis is a prime example. For want of a better formula it may be called the inclusive type.

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.