Canon law history history up to and including Gratian’s Decretum has seen a renewed interest over the past two decades. Many collections and compilers of collections have been studied in great detail, with scholarly monographs and critical editions being now available for most major collections of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the course of this, traditional narratives as epitomized by Fournier and Le Bras in their magisterial Histoire are in the process of being replaced, but so far no alternative model has emerged.

The conference aims to encourage specialists in the field as well as scholars working in other areas of history to rethink these narratives and, hopefully, to stimulate discussion on what a new consensus may look like. This consensus need not take the form of a new master narrative, but we assume that more than just agreement on how unsatisfactory older narratives are is both possible and desirable.
The first session ‘Orders of knowledge’ focusses on methodology. It will address the arrangement of canons, the division of materials into book, indeed the very mis-en-page of canon law collections, whoch in the past decade have increasingly been understood as a means of changing the law; as Andreas Thier put it, re-ordering ‘old’ norms became akin to making new norms, a processes he dubbed ‘second-order norm-making’ .

The second session takes up the notion of legal collections as a means of reform in general, and with the reforms of the eleventh and twelfths centuries in particular. Here, Fournier’s paramount influence is still felt. For decades now, his model has been critizised, and the idea of ‘anti-reform collections’ has long been given up. Yet both Fournier’s category of ‘reform collections’ and his chronology are still there, suggesting that some of his insights have stood the test of time – or, if not, have persisted nonetheless for lack of a new consensus.

Finally, the session ‘Scholasticism and legal knowledge’ is about the relation between the development of law on the one hand and ‘scholasticism’ on the other hand. In the old narrative, the link was clear enough; Gratian was said to have put Abelard’s ‘programme’ into practice, and both were understood as heroes of a new, rational, and secular culture of learning. As research both on canon law and on scholasticism has largely abandoned these perspectives, the position of canon law in the intellectual history of the high Middle Ages calls for reassessment.