La doctrine canonique médiévale

The question these articles seek to respond to, in this fifth collection by Jean Gaudemet to be published by Variorum, is how the intellectual elite of the medieval Church perceived the institutions among which they lived - how they portrayed them, and how they sought to influence them. Whether dealing with the papacy and its place in the Church and the world, with the role of the people in government, or with the position of the individual in society, he would argue that this is the essential question. In their response, this elite drew on the Bible and custom, on Roman law and papal letters, in order that the law could encompass all human experience. To achieve this, these jurists needed to create categories and work out principles, hence the recourse to theology and the necessity for a logical structure, a ’systematization’.