UNCOVERING   GRATIAN'S   ORIGINAL

DECRETUM WITH   THE   HELP

OF   ELECTRONIC   RESOURCES*
 

Anders Winroth
 

G
 

I ratian's Decretum. is one of the
^most influential law books ever
I produced. Written around 1140,
it was soon employed in law courts all over Europe and remained in use in
Catholic church courts until 1917. Together with the Roman law books
promulgated by the emperor Justinian, the Decretum formed an interna¬
tional legal system, a European common law, which during the rest of the
Middle Ages provided a framework and a language for national and
regional legislation.

The success of Gratian's work was due to its being the right book at the
right time. The rapidly developing European societies of the eleventh and
twelfth centuries required more sophisticated laws than were readily avail¬
able. This explains why these centuries were characterized by intense efforts
to explore, interpret, and codify law. Gratian's contribution was to collect
the laws of the church and synthesize them into a coherent system. His
Decretum contained almost 4,000 chapters and was also the first ecclesiastical
law collection to contain a commentarv. Some laws seemed to contradict
others, but Gratian used scholastic methods to show that there was always
some way to reconcile such laws with each other. No canon law)'er had tried
to do this before, at least not on as wide a scale. Gratian brought order into
canon law, and his work made it possible to study this subject systematically
and as an academic subject. Thus, he helped create the University of
Bologna, often considered Europe's oldest university. The Decretum became
a bestseller, as is evident from the more than 600 extant medieval manu¬
scripts that contain the work.