Old rules in a changing world

What a priest was and how he should behave was regulated early on in the history of Christianity. Councils in Late Antiquity often made regulations in this regard – so called 'canones'. In the course of the centuries, ever new canons and papal decrees were added to this corpus, regulating priests and their way of life, and these ancient legal texts were collected intensively and reproduced during the Carolingian period. In the long tenth century, bishops were therefore able to draw on a broad reservoir of old, widely distributed normative texts to which a high degree of authority and binding force was attributed.

Our project wants to observe the historical change in the position of priests during the long tenth century. For this purpose, the old canons and papal decrees constitute an interesting methodological challenge: it is obviously not sufficient to simply use as sources texts that were written in the course of the period under study. If we want to observe and measure change, we have to take into account that old norms formulated in canons and papal decrees from late antiquity did not simply lose their validity and authority. These canonical collections continued to be available in the libraries of monasteries as well as collegial and cathedral churches; and they continued to be used.

A vivid example of this methodological challenge is a codex now kept in the Bavarian State Library in Munich (Clm 3860). The book was written in Italy in the tenth century, but soon passed into the library of the cathedral chapter in Augsburg: from there it finally reached the State Library in Munich.

The collection owes its somewhat artificial modern name – in historical research it is normally labelled the 'Collectio Dionysio-Hadriana' – to the fact that Pope Hadrian I dedicated it to Charlemagne in the later eighth century. To a large extent, however, it goes back to a much older text, which the monk Dionysius Exiguus had already compiled in the years around 500. In the Carolingian period, the collection was a bestseller: It was widely distributed from the first third of the ninth century onwards. From the decades up to c. 900, about 80 exemplars are still preserved today. They show that the collection was known in nearly all regions of the Carolingian Empire.

However, during this astonishing process of distribution the 'Collectio Dionysio-Hadriana' was not left unchanged. Thus, our tenth-century Augsburg copy offers some additional material: at the end of the portion containing canons, for example, the Council of Ephesus from 431 is added – as in some other copies[1]. And at the end of the decretals, the Augsburg Codex offers some additions beyond Gregory II's Roman Synod of 721. Interestingly, this material corresponds to that also found in a second copy of the Dionysio-Hadriana, which also originated in Italy but was preserved in Augsburg (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 3860a).

Marked (and even additionally marked with a nota sign) is also Canon 9 of the Council of Ancyra. The provision must indeed have been of some interest to an eleventh-century reader. For this Council of 314 had determined the following: if deacons had indicated already during their ordination that they wanted to marry 'because they cannot remain like this', then they were allowed to remain in their office if they later actually married a woman – because the bishop should give them permission to do so. Those, however, who had kept silent and vowed abstinence at the moment of their ordination were later to be deprived of their office if they ever did marry. During the eleventh century ecclesiastics intensively discussed the question of which parts of the clergy were allowed to be married. In this discourse the old canon of Ancyra must indeed have been of great interest: it stood in clear contradiction to what hardliners tried to enforce in the eleventh century.

No less relevant and explosive in this context was Canon 4 of the Council of Gangra of 340/41: here, anyone who decided that it was not proper to receive the Eucharist from a priest 'who has had a wife' (a presbitero qui uxorem habuit) was threatened with the anathema. In the fourth century, the prevailing view was that married men could receive priestly ordination; they were to abstain from sexual intercourse with their wives once they were ordained. In the eleventh century, some parts of the clergy thought differently: they regarded priests who were married as heretics and tried to enforce that those who aspired to a higher degree of ordination should remain unmarried from the outset.

[1] Cf. e.g. Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Can. 3 (saec. IX^2/4 oder IX^med., Eastern France or Western Germany?); Bern, Burgerbibliothek, A.26 + 89 (saec. IXⁱⁿ, perhaps Alsace?); Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Hamilton 132, fol. 1ra–128va (saec. IX^in-med., Corbie?); Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 3860a (saec. IX², Northern Italy, prov. Augsburg); St. Paul in Lavanttal, Stiftsbibliothek, 6/1 + Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Aug. perg. CIII (saec. IX^1/3, Reichenau); Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, lat. 1337 (saec. IXⁱⁿ, Upper Rhineland).