According to the English monk and historian Matthew Paris, when King Louis IX fell horribly sick to the point of death in 1244, his sorrowful mother Queen Blanche prayed to the Lord to preserve her son and the kingdom of France along with him. Placing relics of the True Cross, the crown of thorns, and the Holy Lance into contact with his body, she made a vow in his name that he would ‘assume the cross’ and journey to the Holy Sepulchre if he recovered his health (Figure 3.1). When Louis made a miraculous recovery, of his own free will he ‘solemnly took the sign of the cross on his shoulders’ and swore that he would undertake the journey to the Holy Land, assuming that the counsellors of his realm agreed with this plan.

For some aspects of the crusading movement, the survival of relevant documentary sources represents an embarrassment of riches, numbering extensive corpora of letters, charters, wills and account rolls. For others, incomplete runs of records and chance survivals of single documents offer a tantalising glimpse into the lost documentary cultures that flourished at the time of the crusades. The cause of this disparity, and the main attenuator of the reliability of those documentary sources which do survive, is the context of preservation, for the preservation of material is prejudiced in favour of Latin institutions that had the administrative machinery and wherewithal necessary to archive documents in any kind of systematic manner.

Benefit of clergy marked a major difference between clergy and laity by the twelfth century, at least in theory. In theory, it granted clergy accused of violent and other crimes immunity from lay justice. It was a cause of the famous clash between Henry II and Thomas Becket, and historians of the Becket ‘crisis’ have thus seen it as a point of conflict between Church and ‘State’. This chapter attempts a different approach, to see it from the perspective of clerical defendants. It begins by tracing the privilege’s evolution in canon law and canonistic doctrine. This legal theory increasingly insisted on clerical immunity from lay jurisdiction but to some extent allowed clerical defendants to submit to lay jurisdiction with episcopal consent, and bishops to hand over incorrigible clerks to secular correction. In subsequent English practice, clerical defendants appeared before lay criminal courts but increasingly fewer pleaded immunity and sought to be handed over to church courts. The reason is that they faced long detention in episcopal custody before their church trial; they preferred instead to explore every means to acquittal in lay courts before pleading clergy as a last resort.

How did a man go about repenting sex with men? Byzantine monks hearing confession drew guidance from the Kanonarion, a penitential manual developed between the sixth and ninth centuries. Unlike sermons that tended to lump together a range of sins between males, the manual separates the penetration of men (arsenokoitia) from the corruption of boys (paidophthoria), and identifies mitigating circumstances, such the penitent’s youth or poverty, or if he was raped. The penances for sex between men were, perhaps surprisingly, the same as for adultery and fornication, and less than for murder or the corruption of children. The Life of Nephon celebrates a repentant sodomite who became a holy man. If Byzantine pastoral care sought to produce the repentant sodomite, the Life of Nephon presents such a subject as a cultural hero. While this material hardly offers a model for contemporary LGBTQ+ liberation, the construction of the repentant sodomite, an identity that Symeon the New Theologian claims for himself, provides an important Byzantine chapter in queer history.

The rights of the insane, it is usually assumed, were not a prominent concern in early modern Europe, and they have rarely attracted the attention of scholars. However, the social and legal significance of mental disease in various times and places is well known, so it should be no surprise to find that the persons of the insane, and their attendant capacities, obligations and rights, were matters of substance in early modern jurisprudence. This essay shows how in this era the European legal understanding of insanity developed, and how the insane were deprived of many of their rights; but also how some of these were preserved. In the first part, I outline the conceptions of insanity, derived from Roman civil law, that were applied by jurists. We shall see that there were broadly two ways of thinking about madness in legal contexts. The first, which had wide acceptance from antiquity to the sixteenth century, treated all kinds of insanity as legally equivalent forms of irrationality.

The clergy were important to the crown because they were (compared with today) very numerous – historians have described the country as ‘swarming with clerics’ and their ‘vast numbers’ as ‘one of the surprises of medieval history’; collectively they were very rich, owning perhaps 20–30 per cent of England’s landed wealth; many had skills which few laymen possessed; and, most importantly, they could, through their performance of religious ritual, send souls to paradise or perdition – hell – in the everlasting world to come. Religion was the way that medieval people made sense of the world; it was not an optional extra in life but affected all aspects of society. Everyone was a church member.

The Dictatus papae gives clues to Gregory VII’s mindset but had no practical effect on religious history.

This chapter examines the concept of heresy through the growth of papal decretals, canon law and conciliar legislation during the High and Late Middle Ages (eleventh to fifteenth centuries). It explores the growth of medieval heresy during a period of burgeoning papal power and examines how popes both reacted to and constructed ideas of heresy and heretics.

Archdeacon Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85), is associated with a radical and swift change in the Roman Church. The vision of a Christendom jointly administered by emperor and clergy, the famous model advanced by Pope Gelasius II (r. 492–96), was transformed into a new order where regnum and sacerdotium occupied separate stacked spheres, with the spiritual claiming superiority. Unlike tenth-century reform movements, the later eleventh-century Roman reforms centered on the papacy. Popes assembled a curia featuring more professional officials, legates, councils, and other technologies of power. The reformed Church cultivated trained lawyers and sympathetic lay leaders. It has been credited with launching a legal “big bang,” the invention of propaganda, the creation of a semi-institutionalized public sphere, and the formation of a persecuting society. Closer examination of institutional changes helps reveal the achievements and limits of this “new world order.”

This chapter articulates, first, the power of Catholic popes to punish the sin of clerical sexual abuse. It examines their ability to use canon law, executive orders, and other religious means to reorganize the Church’s infrastructure and reform the governance of its hierarchy and priests. On a second level, it analyzes the popes’ limited role in sanctioning the crime of clerical sexual abuse. It examines the historical right of popes to punish its clerical personnel, protect its privacy, and maintain its sphere of religious authority, matters that have been challenged by the imposition of criminal law, civil lawsuits, and state investigations. Finally, it concludes that papal governance on clerical sexual abuse has often been ineffective, that social and management problems still exist, and that they will impact the papacy’s future moral quandary in Catholic Church–state relations

This chapter traces the conflicting history of the relationship between the popes and the Inquisitions from the early modern period onwards, with a prologue on the late Middle Ages. Its scope embraces the Roman Holy Office alongside the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, with their offshoots in the colonies, since to suppose that these latter were institutions entirely dependent on the Iberian monarchies is over-simplistic. The Roman court and the Index are treated more extensively, especially since the Holy Office was considered the most eminent Congregation of the Curia. The text also seeks to determine the extent to which the Roman Inquisition impinged on the autonomy of the popes or the development of Catholic dogma and orthopraxy on a global scale. Lastly, it looks at the later evolution of the Holy Office up until its mutation into the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the twentieth century.

This chapter sets out the history of the process of electing the pope, including the development of voting rules, procedures, sites of election, and a wider electoral culture. The basic format for the modern papal election evolved gradually over a period from 1059 to the 1400s, with the first “conclaves” taking place in the mid-thirteenth century. In contrast to papal elections, papal resignations have been rare, with most occurring during the first Christian millennium. The question of how a pope might relinquish office nevertheless still interested canonists until long after this date, and rules about how popes might resign were incorporated into the twentieth-century codes of canon law even before Benedict XVI dramatically invoked them in 2013.

Did the popes, through the medium of decretals, make law or not? Against a long-established tradition expressed forcefully by Walther Ullmann, Harold Berman, and many others, this chapter argues that the legal authority of the medieval papacy, manifested most spectacularly in the issue of thousands of decretal letters, represented not legislation but jurisdiction; that it was generated by the demands of appellants and consultants from across the whole of the Latin Church, from Trondheim (Norway) to Esztergom (Hungary) and Palermo (Sicily); and that the impetus to compile collections of these papal decisions began not in Rome but in the regions, for use in episcopal courts and in the nascent universities where canon law was studied. A selection of rescripts (replies to judicial appeals) and consultations (answers to questions) offers a fascinating insight into these dynamic processes, which helped to shape the development of European law.

This chapter argues that in the early medieval period, Catholic law both reflected and reinforced a largely “horizontal” Church structure, in which bishops played a central role, often in close engagement with secular lords and rulers. The first part of the chapter surveys the types of existing evidence for early medieval Church law, from the Carolingians up until the Gregorian Reform of circa 1050. The second part focuses on continuities between the Carolingian reforms and the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Recent scholarship has increasingly argued that the Carolingian reforms did not end with the fragmentation of the Carolingian empire. Building on that work, this chapter describes three examples of continuities between the Carolingian and Ottonian periods.

In large part the role of the papacy as a legislative institution and a court system was its most significant contribution to Western jurisprudence. This chapter traces the long evolution of the papacy’s legal and legislative development from the late antique to the sixteenth century. It outlines the papacy’s influence over the first law schools in Europe, and the importance of the law schools in cultivating, teaching, and interpreting papal law.

The College of Cardinals is a key constituent organ within the papacy, its members being charged with electing the pope and with advising him. Cardinals were originally priests and deacons who assisted the pope in his liturgical and charitable duties around the city of Rome during the first millennium and also the Bishops of Rome’s neighboring “suburbicarian” dioceses. These three orders of clerics cohered into a single College during the Gregorian reform of the eleventh and twelfth centuries: their status and role in papal affairs has waxed and waned in the centuries since. Today the College is more diverse and representative of global Catholicism than at any point in the past. However, it is also a larger and a less cohesive body, whose members are less familiar with each other – or with the pope – than their predecessors were.