Toward a history of Carolingian legal culture: Canon law collections of early medieval southern Gaul

The first chapter reviews the historiographical treatment of early medieval canon law collections from the sixteenth century, when the Correctores Romani issued the official edition of the Corpus Iuris Canonici, to the twentieth century. Polemical considerations shaped the methodology of the discipline. When Counter-Reformation editors formulated a definition of the corpus of canon law, they described a markedly Romanocentric law, which became the standard for judgments of "authenticity" and "authority." Early medieval collections did not conform to the pattern of canon law established and authorised by the Counter-Reformation Curia and were stigmatised as "private." It is necessary to re-examine the collections from the perspective of medieval canonists, not that of ecclesiastical or national apologists.;The second chapter provides an historical context for the production and circulation of canon law in southern Gaul. In place of the account of a Frankish nation without adequate canon law until Charlemagne's importation of the Roman Collectio Dionysio-Hadriana, one can substitute a description of a culture rich in legal discourse. The context for southern Gallic canonical activity was the cultural milieu shared by the descendants of the Romano-Visigothic and Gallo-Roman aristocracies of northeast Spain and southern France. This chapter discusses the evidence for pre-Carolingian legal activity in the region, and examines southern Gallic canonical resources during the Merovingian period.;The third chapter is devoted to the Collectio Dacheriana. After examining previous faulty descriptions of the collection's recensions, discussion turns to the Dacheriana's use of other collections in use in Lyons, the Collectio Hispana and the Collectio Dionysiana. The collection was purposefully compiled by several editors, and its attraction for the politically aggressive Carolingian episcopacy derives particularly from its contribution to the developing use of penance as a disciplinary sanction. While it has been axiomatic to refer to the Dacheriana as a collection in three books, there is a fourth book, composed in Lyons in the ninth century, possibly as a tract in the debate over Predestination. From such use, it is apparent that early canon law collections should not be treated as the "private" compilations but as expressions of public legal processes.;The fourth chapter examines the public nature of the early medieval canon law collections. Smaller collections produced in Carolingian southern Gaul illuminate the development, reception, and transmission of canon law. Legal culture in southern Gaul is no longer emanating from Lyons, but is increasingly distributed across the episcopal centres at the northern borders of the province. Southern Gallic canonists had developed a distinctive legal tradition differing in several respects from that evolving in northern France. The legal resources of these centres are influenced by the jurisprudence of the northern Frankish jurists, who replace the literal qualities of the Romano-Gallic canon law of the south with metaphorical expressions that accommodate new political ideologies.