Recognising jurisdictions within the church before the Liber Extra

Abstract

This paper investigates how local and papal jurisdictions were interpreted in the later-twelfth century church and its growing body of novel law. Focussing on the period before 1234, it uses a letter sent by Pope Alexander III in the 1160s to the bishop of Lincoln over a relatively minor matter as a case study. The letter responded to an issue of illicit ordination in the diocese but tangentially touched on questions of hierarchy and jurisdiction in the church, particularly the relationship between the ever-strengthening papal law and local episcopal jurisdictions. By tracing the route through which this letter became ‘law’ in the 1234 Liber Extra, this paper will once again emphasize the importance of local legal actors in shaping canon law in the period between 1140 and 1234, but look to how even tangential matters can put forward subtle arguments around the recognition of different jurisdictions within the church at the time by legal actors both at and away from the papal curia.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Summerlin, D. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1559-9365
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2025 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in The Journal of Legal History is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Keywords:	Papacy; canon law; bishops; decretals; clerical crime; Lincoln; Pope Alexander III
Dates:	Published: 24 March 2025 Published (online): 24 March 2025 Accepted: 13 January 2025
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
Funding Information:	Funder Grant number BRITISH ACADEMY (THE) IC4/100216
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	25 Mar 2025 15:40
Last Modified:	25 Mar 2025 15:40
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1080/01440365.2025.2456285
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:224751

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)

Recognising jurisdictions within the church before the Liber Extra

Abstract

Metadata

Downloads

Accepted Version

Published Version

Export

Statistics