Kenneth Pennington and Melodie Harris Eichbauer,eds,Law as Profession and Practice in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honor of James A. Brundage

Reviewed by: Thomas Kuehn, Clemson University, SC, USA

James Brundage has enjoyed a long, distinguished and prolific career as a scholar and teacher of medieval canon law. Across more than half a century Brundage published important studies on jurisprudence and the development of the legal profession, crusades and the law of war, and the canon law relating to sex and marriage. Twenty of his students and colleagues here offer their essays on these various areas of study in tribute to their friend and mentor. Unsurprisingly, in a volume touching on so many different themes and containing so many papers, the results are uneven. Essays on fairly narrow topics sit side by side with discussions of broad issues. What unites them all is the strength of the meticulous attention to sources by all the authors. And perhaps that is indeed the most fitting form of homage to Brundage.

The first section of seven papers on medieval legal and constitutional thought is emblematic of the volume as a whole. Olivia Robinson combs thirteenth-century episcopal registers for evidence of disputes regarding loans from bankers to English bishops. Her paper is followed by Thomas Izbicki’s on the fifteenth-century Dominican theologian Juan de Torquemada’s views of witches. His is a very different subject, but delivered with the same close reading of sources as employed by Robinson. The late James Powell explores Innocent III’s ideas for secular government in the papal states and Sicily. Brian Tierney offers an illuminating reading of John Locke that is critical of a Straussian perspective on him. Charles Reid’s essay deals with twelfth- and thirteenth-century canonists’ opinions of just war. Kenneth Pennington considers feudal oaths of fidelity and homage from canonists’ points of view, and James Muldoon explores differences between Hugo Grotius and John Seldon on rights of access to the seas and the extension of jurisdiction from the shore into the water.

The second section (‘Schools, the English Church, and Texts’) is even more eclectic. It opens with a gem by Edward Peters in which he argues for a reconceptualization of the relations between legal humanism and scholastic law across two centuries. There follow papers by: Patrick Zutshi on Cambridge’s status as a studium generale (generally acknowledged as such long before John XXII’s letter of 1318 conferring that status); Richard Helmholz on regulating the number of proctors in London ecclesiastical courts, primarily on the evidence of a brief early Tudor tract; Peter Landau on a collection of twelfth-century decretals in an English Cistercian monastery; Elizabeth Makowski on fifteenth-century Chancery suits by cloistered nuns; Marjorie Chibnall on Orderic Vitalis’s attention to canon law; and Michael Gervers and Nicole Hamonic, whose combined effort finds evidence of social conflicts in the reign of King John by careful statistical study of the language in charters composed during the Interdict (1208–1214).

The third section on ‘Law, Sex, and Marriage’ begins with Charles Donahue’s argument for the distinction between the Bolognese twelfth-century civilian, Johannes Bassianus, and a more obscure Bolognese canonist named Bazianus. As he studies Bazianus’s positions on marriage during the time canon law on the subject was swiftly evolving, Donahue yields insights on a shifting area of law and the context in which a decidedly second-rate talent sought solutions to emerging problems. Richard Kay looks at ninth-century visions of Charlemagne suffering in hell for his concubinary relationships, which had a place in the canonistic argument for the singularity of marriage. Glenn Olsen studies erotic imagery in Occitanian and Provençal Romanesque churches that attempted to display the disorders of unbridled lust, yet did so in a provocative manner rejected by the more austere Gothic style that followed.

The final section carries two papers revolving around the crusades: Jonathan Riley-Smith’s reconstruction of some legislation of the Templars, whose archive has been lost, and Robert Somerville’s on the papal legate, Adhemar of Le Puy, of the First Crusade. There is, in short, something of interest in this volume for a wide variety of medieval historians and some early modernists as well, and not just those concerned with canon law or even law more generally. Brundage’s own work had an impact over that broad a spectrum of fields, so in that sense too this volume is an apt homage to him.