The Bishop as Lawmaker in Late Medieval Europe

Abstract

Throughout the later Middle Ages, bishops across Latin Christendom issued statutes to guide the clergy and instruct the faithful within their dioceses. Following the lead of medieval jurists, modern scholars have understood this local episcopal legislation as disseminating and reinforcing the so-called ‘universal law’ promulgated by popes and general church councils. Yet a closer look at the surviving corpus of diocesan statutes reveals bishops’ readiness to wield selective citations and editorial omissions so as to shape local knowledge of church law in accordance with episcopal priorities. More broadly, this article contends that such local law-making also offered bishops a means to resist the papacy’s increasing claims to legislative and jurisdictional supremacy within the church. Faced with a wealth of new legislation that was firmly papalist in its origin and presentation, many bishops opted to emphasize their law-making authority by framing their borrowings of the universal law as emanations of their own episcopal will. The resulting corpus of diocesan statutes thus expressed in practice a vision of episcopal authority that differed sharply from the prescriptions of popes and jurists, and which presaged the explosive ecclesiological controversies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.