Untitled

12 Introduction
eval canon-law history would be an interesting topic.) The great
Gabriel Le Bras defies classification: he was somewhere between
law, theology and sociology: a great historian by nature but not
by formal training. Joyce, a theologian, wrote a fine synthesis,
and the German school of Catholic medieval historical theology,
notably M•uller, Brandl, and Ziegler, also made contributions
which have lost little of their value today. Still, they were not writing
primarily for a community of historians and, perhaps more important,
they wrote at a time when social history had not attained the
dominance it enjoyed in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Non-historians have continued to contribute even in those decades.
Goody, who raised with great intelligence even if he did
not solve the historical problem of the ‘forbidden degrees’, came
from anthropology; Gaudemet, Weigand, Helmholz, and Donahue
were again from law; Jean Leclercq, though clearly a
historian in his attitudes and approach and with his finger on the
See especially his article on ‘Mariage. III. La doctrine du mariage chez les
th‹eologiens et canonistes depuis l’an mille’, in Dictionnaire de th‹eologie catholique
(15 vols. excluding indexes; Paris, 1899–1950), ix (1926), 2123–223.
G. H. Joyce, Christian Marriage: An Historical and Doctrinal Study (London
etc., 1933).
M. M•uller, Die Lehre des hl. Augustinus von der Paradiesesehe und ihre Auswirkung
in der Sexualethik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts bis Thomas von Aquin:
Eine moralgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Studien zur Geschichte der katholischen
Moraltheologie, 1; Regensburg, 1954).
L. Brandl, Die Sexualethik des heiligen Albertus Magnus (Regensburg, 1955).
J. G. Ziegler, Die Ehelehre der P•onitentialsummen von 1200–1350: Eine Untersuchung
zur Geschichte der Moral- und Pastoraltheologie (Regensburg, 1956).
J. Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge,
1983). This has received a fair amount of criticism though there has been a general
appreciation too of the way the book has opened up the subject. For my own critiques
see ‘Peter Damian, Consanguinity and Church Property’, in L. Smith and B. Ward
(eds.), Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson
(London, 1992), 71–80 at 76–7, and ‘Lay Kinship Solidarity and Papal Law’, in P.
Sta·ord, J. L. Nelson, and J. Martindale (eds.), Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays
in Honour of Susan Reynolds (Manchester, 2001), 188–99.
J. Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident: les m¥urs et le droit (Paris, 1987), to
name only one of his contributions.
R. Weigand, Liebe und Ehe im Mittelalter (Bibliotheca Eruditorum, 7; Goldbach,
1993).
R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974).
C. Donahue, Jr., ‘The Monastic Judge: Social Practice, Formal Rule, and the
Medieval Canon Law of Incest’, in P. Landau, with M. Petzolt (eds.), De iure
canonico medii aevi: Festschrift f•ur Rudolf Weigand (Studia Gratiana, 27; Rome,
1996), 49–69; (with Norma Adams), Select Cases from the Ecclesiastical Courts of the
Province of Canterbury, c. 1200–1301 (Selden Society, 95; London, 1981).
See above, n. 37.