The general matrix of medieval misogyny was based on women’s corporeal and moral inferiority as opposed to men, and found its ultimate biblical justification in the second version of the Creation (Genesis 2:18–23).1 After shaping [formavit] Adam from the slime of earth, God constructs [aedificavit] Eve from Adam’s rib, and she becomes bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh. Despite the existence of the first version (Genesis 1:27), where God creates [creavit] man and woman at the same time and to his image, the second version will position the female from the beginning as a bodily derivate of the male. This inferiority acquires further moral dimension with the Fall (Genesis 3:1–7): the serpent approaches Eve, who will eat from the forbidden fruit and give it to Adam. The female is the one who is responsible for the hardships and sufferings of earthly existence, because of her proneness to transgression and deceit. The widespread dissemination of this second version to all strata of society continued to maintain and reinforce negative stereotypical attitudes toward women in the Middle Ages and beyond.

The strange and interesting bigamia rule remained a constant from the fourth century on, but the social worlds to which it was applied were different. A high proportion of the (very numerous) thirteenth-century clerics in minor orders did not have much to do with the clerical world, whereas their late Antique counterparts were presumably more or less integrated into the tight community around the city’s bishop. In the thirteenth century, the bigamia rule enabled popes and kings to deny clerical privileges to phony clergymen who enjoyed fiscal and judicial immunities, even though those clerics were supported by bishops whose power and profits they enhanced.

In the period from 1050–1150 we see law and life ricocheting off each other, and rapid changes in both. Early fifth-century canon law provided a basis for imperial intervention in doubtful papal elections, legitimating Leo IX, who initiated the papal turn. In a number of areas the earliest papal jurisprudence provoked reform. The mismatch between law and life was a long-term result – in an age of urbanization! - of the post-Roman ruralization of Christianity. Ancient canon law was designed for city Christian communities concentrated around the bishop. It was ill-adapted to a world of isolated parish priests who could not be expected to maintain celibacy within marriage. Similarly, election of bishops by the ‘clergy and people’ was less practicable in a large rural diocese than in a concentrated urban community. The papal turn found expression in new legislation, notably about celibacy, which now meant something different from the celibacy required by late Antique papal law. But the new rules proved too simplistic, and further legal evolution followed. ‘Gratian’ expanded by his own commentary the meaning of canons – including papal decretals from late Antiquity – for his own age.

Natural law, in the Augustinian and Thomist sense, reflects not merely man’s nature as it is, but as it should be, accounting for the moral aspirations and moral instincts they believed were natural to man’s being. Natural law requires us to live justly: to live well in society, with love towards one another. What does it mean to love our neighbors politically? It means to live and govern in accordance with the “tranquility of order.” Responsibility for upholding this kind of peace is what “sovereignty” meant in the Augustinian era. Peace is not merely the absence of violence, but the presence of the conditions that enable flourishing. Just war is war that accords with justice: it is authorized political violence required to uphold love-directed justice. War is an instrument for defending and sustaining the tranquility of order, understood as an act of love for our neighbors and our enemies alike. With this framework, Augustinian thinkers generally favored humanitarian and state building interventions: military operations to protect the innocent, stop war crimes or crimes against humanity, punish tyrants and war criminals, and foster conditions of lasting peace and stability.

This paper seeks to deepen our understanding of Jean’s idea of ‘the natural’ by exploring how Jean relates to the complex (often self-contradictory) discourse that formed around medieval discussions of natural law. These discussions occur in legal and theological arenas in Bologna and Paris, a deeply suggestive context for Jean’s presentation of the natural. Such investigations are timely after renewed focus on documentary records relating to the life of Jean de Meun has revealed more details relating to his legal training in Bologna, but this chapter also shows thirteenth-century legal thought spilled out beyond the boundaries of juridical writings: Jean need not have been a lawyer to come into contact with these ideas. Instead of seeking to identify an individual ‘source’ that will decode Jean’s attitude to nature, I point towards a complex of developing ideas, a discourse to which he responds and in which he intervenes. Focusing on the legal tradition that led Aquinas to claim that human nature is double in a discussion of natural law, and relating this to the double nature of the human experience of desire in the Rose, this chapter seeks to cast new light on a relatively unexamined aspect of Jean’s intellectual development.

The aim of the book is twofold: to uncover the content of the legal uncertainties that led bishops to write to popes in the decades around 400 CE, and to establish the texts of their legal rulings as found in the three earliest canon law collections. Data to enable users to track the subsequent reception of these rulings up to the mid-twelfth century is also provided.

This final chapter expands the “millennium” into the early twelfth century, sketching pivotal historical/legal developments that had profound impact for church law. These include the transmission of important early canonical collections such as the ninth-century Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals; the rise to prominence of the Reform papacy in the pontificate of Leo IX (1049–54) as a source of law via papal letters and decrees of church councils; and the compilation of new canonical collections that blended recent legislation with traditional texts. In addition, the late eleventh-century rediscovery of the Digest of Justinian, a work assembled in the sixth century, provided investigators c. 1100 with a vast reservoir of legal ideas from antiquity. The complicated task of trying to blend these diverse materials into a coherent, noncontradictory corpus posed a hermeneutical challenge that was taken up by writers such as Alger of Liège, Bernold of Constance, and especially bishop Ivo of Chartres. Their resulting works opened a window on “new horizons” and paved the way by the middle of the twelfth century for the great textbooks of scholastic method in church law and theology, assembled respectively by Gratian, and Peter Lombard.

Hailing from North Africa, Lactantius was an imperial professor of Latin rhetoric, a position that brought him to the courts of the emperors Diocletian and Constantine. This chapter explores themes in his Divine Institutes that bear on his legal thought. In addition to setting out Lactantius’s conception of religious tolerance and its influence on the emperor Constantine’s religious policy, the chapter considers the role of “divine law” in Lactantius’s work. He found the first two principles of divine law in Matt 22:36–40 and considered them equivalent to pietas and aequitas in Cicero’s thought. Just as Roman citizens were defined by their access to Roman law, so adherence to divine law, for Lactantius, constituted both Christian and Roman identity. After Augustine of Hippo rejected Lactantius’s suggestion that the law of the state could be a faithful image of the divine law, Western medieval scholars largely ignored the legal thrust of Lactantius’s arguments. Nevertheless, his advocacy of religious tolerance gained currency in recent times, when the Second Vatican Council embraced it.