Pope Leo of Bourges, clerical immunity and the early medieval secular

This article investigates the early medieval secular through the lens of clerical immunity – that is, the legal exemption of clerics from courts labelled as secular. It focusses on a short text, eventually attributed to Pope Leo, which was written in fifth‐century Gaul to define this immunity. By pursuing this text’s fate as it was revised and put to use into the eleventh century, the article demonstrates how the early medieval secular was a religious category employed for different purposes at different times.