Christianity: Details about 'Decretal'
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Decretals (Epistolae decretales) is the name that is given in Canon Law to those letters of the pope which formulate decisions in ecclesiastical law. They are generally given in answer to consultations, but are sometimes due to the initiative of the popes. These furnish, with the canons of the councils, the chief source of the legislation of the church, and formed the greater part of the Corpus Iuris Canonici before they were formally replaced by the Codex Iuris Canonici of 1917. However, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri lead the papal commission for the revision of canon law and later on published a guide to the fonts used in the 1917 code, many canons in this code can easily be retraced in their relationship to and dependency on medieval decretals as well as Roman law. In themselves the medieval decretals form a very special source which throws light on medieval conflicts and the approaches to their solution. They are sometimes concerned with very important issues touching on many aspects of medieval life, for example marriage and legal procedure. Decretal collectionsThe early collections of decretals were not commissioned by the popes. A number of bishops collected decretals and tried to organize them into collections. Burchard of Worms and Ivo of Chartres made influential collections. From the Collectio Francofurtana (around 1180) onwards collections get a more systematic character. In quick succession four socalled compilationes appeared between 1191 and 1226, a sign of the growing importance of papal decretals. The fifth compilation, the Compilatio Quinta was made by the canonist Tancred for Honorius III in 1226, who sent it immediately to the university of Bologna. It was organized in five books Pope Gregory IX commissioned the Dominican Raymund of Peñafort to edit a comprehensive collection of papal decretals. This collection appeared in 1234 as the Decretales Gregorii IX, also known as the Liber Extra. The Liber Extra, too, was immediately send to the universities of Bologna and Paris. It contains nearly 2000 decretals. In 1298 pope Boniface VIII published the next major collection of decretals. He entrusted three canonists with its redaction. This collection is known as the Liber Sextus. In the fourteenth century a few small collections followed: the Constitutiones Clementinae or Clementines (1317), edited by Anastasius Germonius and published by pope John XXII, and the Extravagantes Johannes XII (1325-1327). This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, a publication in the public domain.
Décrétale Decretalen Dekretal decretal
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