ABSTRACT
Burchard's Decretum was one of the most popular books of Church law during the eleventh century. Three misperceptions about the collection, however, have persisted. The first is that the Decretum was not widely utilized during or after the papal reforming movements of the second half of the eleventh century. The second is that Decretum lacked a systematic view of Church law. This led to the third misunderstanding: that the Decretum ceased to be influential because the papal reformers produced books of Church law which were qualitatively different from the supposedly unsystematic Decretum. With a better understanding of manuscripts and collections, scholars have questioned the first misconception: that the Burchardian Decretum ceased to be copied much or used widely during the papal reforming movements. Detlev Jasper and Linda Fowler-Magerl have demonstrated that canonists of the Reform period extensively utilized the Decretum as a source, and that scriptoria continued to make copies during this period.
