“The Bony, Grasping Hand”: Nineteenth-Century American Protestant Views on Medieval Canon Law

Summary

Like their ancestors at Massachusetts Bay, nineteenth-century American Protestants distrusted, even loathed, the Church of Rome. Time had not diminished the perceived threat of Rome and her Jesuit agents to the “city on the hill.” Rome represented everything repugnant to those who viewed themselves as the standard-bearers of Gospel salvation and enlightened modernity. Popular and academic cultures shared this prejudice. As Richard Hofstadter noted years ago, such hostility fanned the flames of anti-intellectualism.

I wish to focus on one manifestation of this hostility: views on medieval canon law, especially the early canon law down to the appearance of Gratian's Decretum in the middle of the twelfth century. Through the Internet, many of these texts, from textbooks to popular tracts, are available for study. They enable a survey of both scholarly and lay audiences. What we encounter is a decidedly mixed message, often hostile, occasionally fanciful or trivial. Taken together, they function as a body of folklore like modern “urban legends,” cautionary tales conveying a message about the threat of the exotic, the “other” threatening the social and religious status quo.

The Matter of Early Medieval Canon Law

Early canon law evolved through three distinct phases. From late antiquity down to the middle of the eleventh century, the tradition of the Church – from the Bible, to the canons of church councils, to papal letters – was transmitted through a variety of collections. None had normative value; each compiler drew on older collections while adding new texts. In the early eleventh century, Bishop Burchard of Worms produced his Decretum, a harvest of this diverse tradition, which exercised immense influence during the next century. During the eleventh century, the ecclesiastical reform movement sparked new interest in canonical tradition. This resulted in the production of new collections both at Rome – where they promoted claims of primacy and power – and in the provinces. Among these many collections, those of Bishop Ivo of Chartres, especially his Panormia, served much the same function as had Burchard's Decretum a century earlier.

With the appearance of Gratian's Decretum (Concordia discordantium canonum) around 1140, the Church finally gained something like Justinian’s Digest, an organised textbook of ecclesiastical law. Drawing upon Ivo and Burchard, along with other collections, Gratian fixed tradition in a form that would become the schoolbook for the Church's law.