Cover
Titel
Tradition und Innovation im kirchlichen Recht. Das Bußbuch im Dekret des Bischofs Burchard von Worms Ostfildern


Autor(en)
Kynast, Birgit
Reihe
Quellen und Forschungen zum Recht im Mittelalter
Erschienen
Anzahl Seiten
541 S.
Preis
€ 68,00
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Greta Austin, Religion, University of Puget Sound

Have you done what some women are accustomed to doing? They take menstrual blood and mix it into food or drink and give it to their husbands to make them love them more. If you have done this, you should do five years of penance on the appropriate fast days.1

Many tantalizing passages like this one appear in a long questionnaire near the end of a canonical and penitential handbook, the Decretum of Burchard, bishop of Worms (d. 1025). There are 196 questions in canon 5 of book 19, which focuses on penance. The questionnaire is comprehensive and long. It surveys a wide range of offenses, beginning with the most serious such as homicide, perjury, fornication, and adultery. It moves to ones involving same-sex sexual contact, dietary regulations and gluttony, as well as practices invoking the supernatural. It concludes with particular offenses “which pertain to women,” including abortion and access to the supernatural. Unlike other canons, the questions lack attributions (i.e., inscriptions). Burchard or his assistants probably wrote some of the questions, especially in the last section on women. The questionnaire is thus a very helpful way to understand the collection and Burchard’s interests. Burchard’s collection had many possible uses: for the bishop as he visited his diocese and held synods; for the teacher as they taught students; and for the priest as he administered penance.

The Decretum has attracted considerable scholarly attention since the landmark study by Hartmut Hoffmann and Rudolf Pokorny.2 They identified the earliest manuscripts made in the Worms scriptorium, and showed that these were working copies with many erasures and changes. They provided tables listing the formal and material sources of the canons – although not for the questions in 19.5, a lacuna that Kynast’s book fills. Hoffmann and Porkony’s research paved the way for more scholarship on the Decretum. This reviewer argued that a comprehensive vision of laws and penance underpinned the collection.3 The interest in Burchard’s collection has culminated with a multi-year project, based in Mainz, to edit the collection and study its manuscript tradition.4

Burchard’s collection has been characterized as a useful reference book. Similarly, Birgit Kynast’s book – originally a University of Mainz dissertation – is an exceptionally useful reference book and an invaluable source. Unlike Burchard’s collection, which was designed to be easily carried around by bishops visiting their diocese, Kynast’s monograph weighs in at over 500 pages. Through her detailed comparisons of the texts to their sources, Kynast demonstrates how actively Burchard shaped his collection. She provides exhaustive evidence for this reviewer’s argument that Burchard systematized and aligned rules and practices. He presented his texts clearly in a comprehensive but concise way. He also worked to underpin their authority by aligning them with a short list of authorities he listed in his preface. To accomplish these goals, Burchard sometimes tinkered with his sources, especially their inscriptions.

Kynast focuses the main body of her analysis on Burchard’s treatment of homicide – of interest to modern law, although she cautions against reading modern legal definitions into his work (p. 188). Chapter VII (pp. 185–366) analyses every question regarding the crime of homicide: its content, the precedents in the Decretum (usually book 60, parallels in Regino of Prüm’s Libri duo, other possible formal (immediate) and material (original) sources, and the relationship of the texts to each other.

Because about a third of the texts in 19.5 have parallels in books 1–18 of the collection, modern scholars have often assumed that the list of questions in 19.5 merely summarizes the previous content. Kynast, however, provides an important corrective to that assumption. She shows exhaustively how Burchard compared the formal sources from which he took canons and worked creatively with these in writing the questions. In rearranging, rewording, integrating, and harmonizing his sources, the compilers’ editorial work often resulted in “implizite Kommentierung” (p. 374), as this reviewer has argued.

Burchard’s collection is often characterized as useful, and the same is true of “Tradition und Innovation”. Kynast provides historical context, such as in an excursus on Burchard and his relationship to Judaism (pp. 242–244). She explains terminology, such as the collection’s various ways of describing the unfree (pp. 250–251). Kynast nuances this reviewer’s conclusions about the Bible. Whereas I argued that Burchard founded his hierarchies of offenses on Biblical passages, Kynast points out that that Burchard worked with the ecclesiastical tradition more than the Bible (pp. 189–192, p. 379), although one could also note that the ecclesiastical tradition was also conflicted. The reader will appreciate her thorough discussions of the relevant secondary literature.

Kynast discusses all the questions not on homicide in Chapter VI (pp. 99–184). Her analysis of questions 121–128 on same-gender sexual acts between a man and another man, and between women (questions 156–160), for example, pays careful attention to language used to describe these acts, and locates the texts in the relevant bibliography on medieval sexuality (pp. 137–144). Kynast is extremely thorough. For instance, this reviewer simply noted Burchard’s understanding of humans as made “in the image of God”. Kynast identifies a theological treatise that might have supplied this concept (pp. 341–344).

The tables in “Tradition und Innovation” are highlights. Table 5 provides transcriptions of the questions in the two earliest manuscripts (pp. 432–475). Table 6 lists any parallels in the Libri duo, the Decretum, the question’s formal source, its material sources, as well as notes on erasures. This table shows where Burchard innovated more than in other sections. He probably wrote a great number of the texts on “Nichtchristliche Praktiken und Vorstellung”. Finally, table 7 provides a transcription of the list of questions in book 1 of Regino’s Libri duo. This reader would have appreciated a transcription of the list of questions in Libri duo book 2, and an index for the specific questions, but those are minor quibbles.

Scholarship is an ongoing discussion, and Kynast’s conclusions should be considered in light of John Burden’s research on book 19, published after this book went to press. Burden argued that the Decretum was designed to be used, above all, during episcopal visitation rather than by priests during penance, whereas Kynast argues for both.5

Anyone interested in the rich history of penance and canon law, in social history, in the history of criminal law, and in gender studies, will find “Tradition und Innovation” an essential reference book.

Notes:
1 Burchard of Worms, Decretum, 19.5.178; transcription in Kynast at p. 471.
2 Hartmut Hoffmann / Rudolf Pokorny, Das Dekret des Bischofs Burchard von Worms. Textstufen-Frühe Verbreitung-Vorlagen (MGH: Hilfsmittel 12), Munich 1991.
3 Greta Austin, Jurisprudence in the Service of Pastoral Care. The Decretum of Burchard of Worms, in: Speculum 79 (2004), pp. 929–959; idem, Shaping Church Law around the Year 1000. The Decretum of Burchard of Worms, Aldershot 2009.
4https://www.adwmainz.de/en/projects/burchards-dekret-digital/description.html (21.08.2024).
5 John Burden, Reading Burchard’s Corrector. Canon Law and Penance in the High Middle Ages, in: Journal of Medieval History 46 (2020), pp. 77–97.

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