While Late Antique decretals were being transmitted to new generations, popes corresponded with kings and emperors, by the mid-to-late eighth century at times in surprisingly faulty Latin, and a new genre of papal document appeared alongside them, solemn privileges, written on papyrus, two or three meters long, mostly for monasteries. Not much thought was required to compose them, as beneficiaries brought drafts of the substantive part and a formulary supplied the top and the tail. What exactly these privileges granted is a matter of debate. They were written in a script descended from late Roman cursive and hard to read. This was probably an advantage. The archaic script concealed bad Latin. And the appearance would have inspired awe. In the eleventh century the late Roman script and the long papyrus format were abandoned, to be replaced by new devices to make the document impressive. What exactly they were granting to monasteries became clearer in the twelfth century.

The chapter looks at period boundaries – c. 500, c. 1000 – and ways of transcending them. To position oneself on a boundary is one way, and another is to look for deep continuities. Here additional schemas have been proposed: the re-emergence of a half-submerged system with the recurrence of the conditions that gave rise to it originally, and, above all, the evolution of a sequence of communications (as opposed to a constant idea) like a conversation, from its origin through its twists and turns over many centuries. The history of the first papal jurisprudence’s reception over time can be a ‘part for the whole’, a synecdoche for the changes in history of Western Christianity. Tracing its reception helps to subvert the apartheid of periodization.

The century between c. 1130 and 1234 was a time of great renewal and transformation in canon law when much of the foundation was laid that would define the legal structure of not only the church but also secular society well into modern times (see Chapter 30). At this time, papal legislation found its stride, in the form of papal decretals and conciliar decrees (notably from the four Lateran councils, 1123–1215). The inhabitants of Europe sought out the pope’s judicial decisions in unprecedented masses, creating a rich body of papal case law. At the same time, legal study grew exponentially at the law schools, particularly in Bologna, where an expanding and often innovative tradition of analysis and commentary, which were also inspired by the recently rediscovered Roman law of the emperor Justinian, brought canon law to new levels of complexity, sophistication, and precision.

In this chapter we deal with letter types and their uses, discussing the popularity of new letter forms in early Christianity. These forms are then divided into groups: episcopal letters, conciliar letters, those written by monastic bishops and by the bishops of Rome. Monastic letters and those of spiritual direction are also considered, together with imperial letters to or from the imperial family and other royal houses.