Making Laws for a Christian Society

The Hibernensis and the Beginnings of Church Law in Ireland and Britain

Roy Flechner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351267229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This is the first comprehensive study of the contribution that texts from Britain and Ireland made to the development of canon law in early medieval Europe. The book concentrates on a group of insular texts of church law—chief among them the Irish Hibernensis —tracing their evolution through mutual influence, their debt to late antique traditions from around the Mediterranean, their reception (and occasional rejection) by clerics in continental Europe, their fusion with continental texts, and their eventual impact on the formation of a European canonical tradition. Canonical collections, penitentials, and miscellanies of church law, and royal legislation, are all shown to have been 'living texts', which were continually reshaped through a process of trial and error that eventually gave rise to a more stable and more coherent body of church laws. Through a meticulous text-critical study Roy Flechner argues that the growth of church law in Europe owes as much to a serendipitous 'conversation' between texts as it does to any deliberate plan overseen by bishops and popes.

1The Hibernensis in context

The titles Hibernensis, Collectio Hibernensis, and Collectio Canonum Hibernensis (sometimes abbreviated CCH or Hib) designate a text found in complete form in seven early medieval manuscripts and in an incomplete or fragmentary form in approximately seventy additional manuscripts. Commonly classified as a canonical collection, the difficulties of identifying the text generically remain unresolved, as described in the Introduction. All surviving manuscripts are from continental Europe, although one fragmentary palimpsest copy in Irish majuscule has been argued to have been written in Ireland or at the very least in an Irish centre in continental Europe. This fragment is dated to the second half of the eighth century, and is now in Trier, Stadtbibliothek, 137/50, fols. 48r–61v.¹ The four earliest manuscripts of the Hibernensis, CopΘCK, dating between the early and mid eighth century, are, likewise, incomplete or fragmentary. The two incomplete copies (CK) share the same lacuna as two manuscripts that were destroyed in World War II (Chartres, Bibl. munic. 124 [127] and Tours, Bibl. munic. 556), which is that they all end at the equivalent of Hib 37.18. The two fragmentary copies (CopΘ) may in fact be witnesses to a draft text of the Hibernensis, as described in detail later in this chapter.

The seven complete early medieval copies of the Hibernensis range in date from the second half of the eighth century (A) to the tenth or eleventh centuries (OV). As early as 1753, Pietro and Girolamo Ballerini observed that there appear to be two different text-types of the Hibernensis (which they designated ‘Collectio Hibernensis’). All copies of the Hibernensis are divided into books, which in turn are divided into chapters, but the Ballerini brothers noted that the text of the Hibernensis in V, a manuscript that they dated to the tenth century, had a different division of books from BP (parts of which had been printed by the Maurists) and omitted a book titled De regionibus census.² They also recorded a variance in the number of books: V was divided into sixty-eight books, whereas P was divided into sixty-five (recte sixty-six).³ A century later, Henry Bradshaw found that another copy of the Hibernensis, H, contained a longer version of the text, consisting of sixty-nine books.⁴ He was the first to formalise the distinction between the two text-types, which he designated ‘A-text’ and ‘B-text’, using the relative number of books as a differentiating criterion. ⁵ The apparent transmission of the text in two text-types, nowadays referred to as the ‘A-Recension’ and ‘B-Recension’, is one of the hallmark features of the Hibernensis to which I shall return later in this chapter.

Selections of material from the Hibernensis were first printed in the 1650s by scholars in London and Paris: in 1656 the Anglo-Irish antiquary James Ware transcribed a number of canons from O and O² attributed to St Patrick and to sinodus Hibernensis. Around the same time the Maurists published a selection from the Hibernensis in Luc d’Achéry’s Spicilegium under the title ‘Canones Hibernenses’.⁶ Their selection, based on P and Q, included distinct Irish canons attributed to sinodus Hibernensis, Anglo-Saxon canons attributed to Archbishop Theodore, and canons attributed to non-insular synods. A second edition by the Maurists, from 1723, included additions from B. The complete text did not appear in print until 1874, when Hermann Wasserschleben, professor of law at Giessen, published an edition based on S, a somewhat defective copy of the A-Recension, with the defects compensated for by complementary readings from other manuscripts, especially P. A fire at the publisher’s warehouse, at Giessen, consumed nearly all copies of this edition, prompting Wasserschleben to undertake a second edition, with an expanded introduction and some corrections to the text, which was published in 1885.

The foregoing description of the manuscript transmission of the Hibernensis and its transmission in print summarises what can be said to be the uncontroversial textual history of this collection. But there remain the equally important, though not entirely settled, questions of the text’s origin and of the circumstances that led to its early transmission in two recensions, in the sense of ‘significantly modified forms of a text’.⁷ These are the questions that I shall turn to now.

In interrogating the text’s origin I shall concentrate on three interrelated criteria: (i) the cultural milieu in which it was compiled, (ii) authorship, and (iii) date of compilation. Beginning with the first criterion, there is a broad consensus ...