Linda Fowler-Magerl, a native of Iowa in the USA, studied with the legal historian Gaines Post at the University of Wisconsin and taught at the University of Nebraska before pursuing research opportunities at the Max-Planck Institute in Frankfurt. She married in Germany, and moved with her husband to the village of Piesenkofen, near Regensburg (Ratisbon) whence she has carried on an estimable career of scholarship and publishing in the field of medieval canon law. Among many other contributions, her Clavis canonum, a pioneering electronic database of critical information concerning hundreds of early medieval collections of canon law has helped to bring canon law research into the twenty-first century. The Clavis has quickly become the best selling volume in the booklist of the prestigious Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Fowler-Magerl, with her typically American openness and generosity of spirit and her Germanic love of Wissenschaft and critical scholarship, has touched the lives and work of many. This elegantly composed volume of essays by friends, colleagues and protégés is a fitting tribute to one of the doyennes of canon law studies today.

The first essay, by Roger Reynolds of the Pontifical Institute in Toronto, introduces readers to a fascinating type of text, the lists of metropoleis and civitates in late antique and early medieval Gaul. These lists continued to be copied throughout the Carolingian and subsequent centuries, and provided, among other things, evidence for use in disputes about contested archepiscopal and episcopal jurisdictions in the ever fluctuating ecclesiastical geography of medieval Europe.

Abigail Firey of the University of Kentucky treats the reader to a careful and nuanced review of the primary sources concerning penance and confession in the Carolingian empire. She discerns therein the seeds of the development of competing jurisdictions of secular and ecclesiastical or ‘penitential’ courts. She proposes suggestively that ‘the introduction of a penitential option as the remedy for transgression and of confessors as the guardians of “the court of conscience” … challenged existing patterns of social order and secular justice’.

Greta Austin of the University of Puget Sound brings her expertise in the large canonical collections of Burchard of Worms and Ivo of Chartres to bear on the question of authority. She asks, first, what Burchard (c. 1010) and Ivo (c. 1100) have to say explicitly in their respective prefaces about the relative authority of the texts that they have assembled, and secondly, what can be learned by evaluating carefully the way in which the two authors treat the ‘inscriptions’ of the canons, that is their attribution to various authorities, whether councils, popes, church Fathers, secular law or penitentials. Her conclusions about the similarities and the differences of the two authors are thoughtful and stimulating.

Christof Rolker of the University of Konstanz uses the close reading of texts and contexts to urge us toward large changes in our view of the so-called Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century. Following a suggestion of Fowler-Magerl's, he draws our attention to the possible role of monasteries and monastic authors north of the Alps in the creation and dissemination of the influential Collection in 74 titles, which has long been considered to be an archetypically papal and Italian collection.

Kathleen Cushing of Keele University, one of the editors of this volume, pays tribute to Fowler-Magerl with her study of a lesser-known collection, the Collectio canonum Barberiniana. A complex collection, compiled incremently in Tuscany (Lucca?) by three different authors between 1050 and 1120 from a variety of sources which are carefully elucidated here, Cushing gives us an excellent illustration of both the difficulties and the potentialities inherent in the study of lesser known collections of pre-Gratian canon law.

Uta-Renate Blumenthal of the Catholic University of America shares the fruits of her labours on the Liber tarraconensis (Biblioteca Publica, Tarragona, ms 26), written at the end of the eleventh century. She attributes the copying of this manuscript to the initiative of the cathedral canons of Roda, and draws our attention to the reform canons of Saint-Ruf, the papal legate Hugh of Die and Gregory vii himself as the probable inspiration for their presumed reforming activities.

Robert Somerville of Columbia University shares his profound knowledge of the eleventh- and twelfth-century church councils with us by revisiting the Council of Pisa, the decrees of which, like many others from this period have survived only in partial and haphazard copies. He provides a generous historical overview of conciliar history as well as transcriptions of some of the fragments which will make possible a full-scale study of the councils of Pope Innocent ii.

Anders Winroth of Yale University, who startled the world of canon law studies by identifiying a ‘first draft’ or early version of Gratian's Decretum, uses the question of marital consent in Gratian's text as a means to test his controversial thesis that there were, in fact, two Gratians. He concludes that the author of the first draft, Gratian 1, ‘was a pastor with a strong interest in law; Gratian 2 was a professional jurist’.

Bruce Brasington turns his attention to one of Fowler-Magerl's favourite subjects, the procedural manuals (Ordines iudiciorum) of medieval jurists. His study of the Ordo ‘Pro utraque parte’, from Tuscany, illuminates from the inside, as it were, some of the complex changes taking place in Italian law and society in the twelfth century.

Martin Brett of Robinson College, Cambridge, the other editor of this volume, provides a dense and revealing example of the uses to which Fowler-Magerl's database can be put. He studies marginal interpolations and other additions (appendices) made in manuscripts of various canonical collections. His surprising conclusion is that the augmenters of the collections associated with Ivo of Chartres ‘were far more concerned to recover earlier tradition than to assimilate modern doctrine’. The reverse was true of editors of decretal collections such as the Compilatio prima.

Peter Landau of the University of Munich, distinguished president of the Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval Canon Law and a long-time friend and colleague of Fowler-Magerl, proposes a striking hypothesis about the beginnings of the teaching of Roman and canon law in England. He adduces a wide range of circumstantial evidence to suggest that the origins of such teaching should be sought in the cathedral city of Lincoln in the 1170s or '80s, and that the migration of the law schools to Oxford should be placed sometime between 1185 and 1190.

The final essay, by James Brundage of the University of Kansas, brings with it the pleasant reminder that canonists, medieval and modern, are known for their sense of humour. His magisterial survey of court procedure and decorum, ‘“My learned friend”: professional etiquette in medieval courtrooms’, is a pleasure to read, and it provides a richly documented body of primary sources for appreciating the courtroom practice of the thirteenth and subsequent centuries.