This is a clear, readable introduction to the basic structures and areas of church rules from one of the nation's most respected canonists. It is now revised, considering the most recent changes to church law, including those initiated by Pope Francis.

The Hibernensis is the longest and most comprehensive canon-law text to have circulated in Carolingian Europe. Compiled in Ireland in the late seventh or early eighth century, it exerted a strong and long-lasting influence on the development of European canon law. The present edition offers—for the first time—a complete text of the Hibernensis combining the two main branches of its manuscript transmission. This is accompanied by an English translation and a commentary that is both historical and philological. The Hibernensis is an invaluable source for those interested in church history, the history of canon law, social-economic history, as well as intellectual history, and the history of the book. Widely recognized as the single most important source for the history of the church in early medieval Ireland, the Hibernensis is also our best index for knowing what books were available in Ireland at the time of its compilation: it consists of excerpted material from the Bible, Church Fathers and doctors, hagiography, church histories, chronicles, wisdom texts, and insular normative material unattested elsewhere. This in addition to the staple sources of canonical collections, comprising the acta of church councils and papal letters. Altogether there are forty-two cited authors and 135 cited texts. But unlike previous canonical collections, the contents of the Hibernensis are not simply derivative: they have been modified and systematically organised, offering an important insight into the manner in which contemporary clerical scholars attempted to define, interpret, and codify law for the use of a growing Christian society.

Canon law is the name given to the rules that govern church order and discipline of the Roman Catholic Church. This valuable book, which has been updated to reflect changes and adaptations in canon law and new resources in the field, offers an introductory orientation of all of canon law. A superb teaching and learning tool, it provides outlines and overviews of relatively complex areas of canon law, sketches the basic structure and design of the various offices and functions within the church and how they relate to each other, and gives an orientation to the more important areas of canon law, as well as a background and context within which more detailed rules can be understood. Two appendices offer guidance for doing canonical research and case studies for further discussion. +

This volume is concerned, above all, with the legal background and the juristic issues behind the ideology and practice of the medieval Crusades. This is an area that the author was the first to investigate systematically, and there are two particular reasons for his approach: one, the conviction that the historical phenomenon of the Crusades can only be adequately understood within the context of the legal systems that permeated the age; the other, that so much of the documentary evidence ” be it charters, decrees even chronicles ” was produced by people whose perceptions had been shaped by the law. A number of articles focus on the roles of individual crusaders, or address ideological questions, including the very concept of Holy War. Others deal with practical issues and the nature of the obligations incurred by a crusader, and examine the consequences these had, both for the institutions of medieval Europe and for the crusader's own family relationships. Ce recueil s'attache avant tout au contexte légal et aux questions juridiques qui se trouvent à la base de l'idéologie et de la pratique des Croisades au Moyen Age. L 'auteur a été le premier à entreprendre des recherches de façon systématique dans ce domaine; deux raisons précises sont à l'origine de cette démarche premièrement, la conviction que seule la connaissance du contexte des systèmes légaux dont l'époque était imprégnée, permet de bien comprendre le phénomène historique des Croisades; deuxièmement, le fait que quantité de documents ” temoins ” chartes, décrets, ou encore chroniques ” sont l'oeuvre de gens dont la perception était grandement influencée par la loi. Un nombre d'études se concentrent sur la rôle individuel de certains croisés, ou s'adressent à des questions d'idéologie, y compris le concept même de la Guerre Sainte. D'autre traitent de questions d'ordre pratique, ainsi que de la nature des engagements contractés par le croisé; ils en examinent le

A broad history of the western European legal tradition. Bellomo discusses the great jurists who gave common law its intellectual vigor as well as the humanist jurists of the period.