Much has been published on the history of the papal law court, the Rota Romana, and in many languages. The book under review here is an English revised version of a monograph which was first published in Finnish.Footnote ¹

I will first consider pages 5–6 and 97ff where the author presents a quantitative analysis of the Rota's day-to-day court practice, based on surviving Manualia actorum of Rota notaries, from 1466 to 1526. The Vatican holds altogether 158 such Manualia for the time span in question. Each volume comprises several hundred notarial notes. The author has used the following samples: (a) all the notes from notaries who officiated under the Rota judge Johannes de Ceretanis (1471–92), which amounts to 2,025 litigations;Footnote ² (b) all the notes of 1466, which amounts to 275 litigations;Footnote ³ (c) all the notes of 1486 (but excluding notaries who officiated under Johannes de Ceretanis), which amounts to 171 litigations;Footnote ⁴ (d) all the notes of 1506, which amounts to 1,265 litigations;Footnote ⁵ (e) all the notes of 1526, which amounts to 1,703 litigations.Footnote ⁶ The five samples altogether comprise more than 27,000 notarial notes, relating to a total of 5,439 litigations.

The author correctly warns that the Manualia actorum provide far less information than case dossiers, so that their utility for quantitative research has narrow limits. While case dossiers in due form comprise the full text of all written information available in court for an individual litigation, the Manualia actorum, in contrast, merely document how the individual litigations progressed through the stages of the process. In the centuries in question, the courts usually discarded their dossiers when a matter was no longer pending,Footnote ⁷ and so did the Rota. One can find surviving dossiers in litigants' archives, however. Also, official copies of medieval Rota dossiers (Regestrum)Footnote ⁸ have also come down to us from such archives. Litigants could buy regestra from the case's Rota notary while the case was pending – thus not just ‘at the conclusion of the case’. No one, so far, has systematically searched for scattered dossiers or regestra. Thus the Manualia actorum are the only suitable source on offer for quantitative statistics.

In the Manualia, each piece of litigation is given a short title. It regularly indicates the place or bishopric where the litigation originated, and it adds a rough categorisation of the matter in dispute. The author has collected together these short titles. Furthermore, she collected the dates on which the various litigations appeared in the Manualia. And, if the names of litigants were mentioned, she also noted these. From her ‘harvest’, the author then drew up her statistics. Some of her results are very surprising. Others confirm estimates which had been made by previous researchers – but the author's results are based on much larger samples of materials and are thus much more convincing. In summary her statistics indicate:

1. 1. That the percentage of matters in dispute varies across the five samples: church benefices 77–85 per cent; property issues 8–19 per cent; marriage 0.5–1 per cent; other 4–6 per cent.

2. 2. That the overall percentage of provenance of litigations is, from the British Isles 1 per cent; from the Iberian Peninsula 28 per cent; from Eastern Europe 2 per cent; from Italy 31 per cent; from France 18 per cent; from Germany 20 per cent; others less than 1 per cent. These overall figures are then divided up according to time spans and the different categories of matters in dispute.

3. 3. That from a subsample of almost 1,000 litigations under the judge Johannes de Ceretanis and over the period 1471–84, the author selected 212 cases from Germany which mention the names of litigants. In half of these cases one or even two litigants could be identified with certainty by means of the German Historical Institute in Rome's Repertorium Germanicum. In total one-third of the identified litigants can be classified as ‘curialists’, thus personnel active at the papal curia, and additionally there were a number of people who had good contacts with the papal curia for other reasons. It thus appears that such persons felt particularly confident to use (or abuse) litigation in the Rota.

4. 4. That in litigation pending before Johannes de Ceretanis, the time span in months before a case appears in the judge's Manualia varies considerably: just one month 930 cases; two months 201 cases; three months 127 cases; 4–6 months 239 cases; 7–12 months 247 cases; 13–24 months 209 cases; more than 24 months 72 cases.

5. 5. That in the Manualia of Johannes de Ceretanis, 70 per cent of litigations remained unfinished (pp. 162, 167–8). If all these cases had really been handled by Johannes alone, and had not been taken over from other Rota judges, or later transferred to others, then this means ‘that some seven out of ten litigations were dropped during the early stages of the process’.

The book's quantitative study is preceded by a sample study in which the author shows how Rota Manualia can help to consolidate local church history (pp. 82–96: litigation about the parish church of Minämäki in Finland). Another section presents corollary findings (pp. 42–81), collected during perusal of Manualia or connected archivalia. The author presents interesting samples of procedural documents, together with notaries’ remarks which cast light on the cycle of audiences in court, holidays, special events in the curia, locations where court sessions were held, and the provisional replacement of judges during illness or temporary absence from Rome. There is the occasional mishap in the transcription of entries but this is not a matter of concern.Footnote ⁹

The first four chapters of the book (pp. 5–41) survey the contents of some previous publications on the Rota: the gradual development of Sacri Palatii causarum auditores (= judges) before 1300, pertinent papal legislation from 1331 onward, function of the Rota, procedure, organisation and personnel. Résumés of the kind are necessarily incomplete and should be used with caution. In particular, the author has not understood in which procedural situations a judge who handled a case had to consult his colleagues, and how this worked in practice (pp. 24, 34–5, 52). Colleagues were asked for advice only on legal problems (not on the establishment of the facts of the case), and only when there existed no sound Rota precedent for the problem at issue. The judge who requested advice was called Auditor ponens. ‘Ponens’ is thus a person – and not ‘a summary’ (pp. 24, 34). The division of judges into three ranks, mentioned by the author (pp. 24, 34–5), had been abolished by 1338. The earliest collection of collegial precedent decisions of the Rota has come down to us from William Bateman (1332–44), not from Thomas Fastolf (1336–7).Footnote ¹⁰