Church Law and the Origins of the Western Legal Tradition : a Tribute to Kenneth Pennington

One of the most striking characteristics of contemporary canonical historical research is that it is being carried on almost entirely by historians, not by canonists. Discounting some civilians such as Senior Circuit Court Judge John Noonan (who is, by the way, self-trained in canon law), the number of lawyers, specifically canon lawyers, engaged in serious historical canonical research is quite small. But canonists qua lawyers must be wary lest they suffer the same fate that befell priests qua homilists in the heyday of post-conciliar Biblical studies: the profundity of the discoveries presented by Biblical historians left those charged with preaching wary of trying to draw any practical conclusion from those discoveries. The more one came to know about the Bible, it seemed, the less one read it, let alone prayed it. The result was that some treated Scripture as a technical domain reserved for those who could read six languages, while others plumbed the Bible for little besides inspiring sentiments. Canonistics face a similar danger. The codification of canon law in the early twentieth century forced ecclesiastical lawyers, who after all still had a major Church to run, to focus almost exclusively on a wide range of practical and administrative canonical issues. Ready resort to the canonical history embodied in the works of past thinkers, which was common for many centuries under decretist and decretalist law, became an esoteric art among canonists, so much so that even the techniques of that kind of research were all but lost with each passing decade. The result is that today, the incredible flowering of canonical (and civil) legal history that is going on remains, it seems, almost completely unutilized, even unrecognized, by daily practitioners of canon law. The volume reviewed here, however, Medieval Church Law, makes some headway in bridging the gap that has grown up between canonical courts and academe in recent decades.