ABSTRACT
Professor A. Winroth has shown convincingly that there is no longer any need for the speculations of Vetulani and Southern concerning the absence of Roman law texts in the early recension of the Decretum. He has done this by taking a radically new look at the common opinion that Irnerius had begun his law school in Bologna towards the beginning of the twelfth century. The lack of Roman law in the first recension should be seen as evidence of the state of legal teaching in Bologna when Gratian was compiling the Decretum, in the twenties and thirties of the twelfth century. Gratian’s influence on the development of canon law in the Latin Church would be difficult to overestimate. At the time of the First Vatican Council I. von Dollinger fulminated against Gratian whom he regarded as an unscrupulous forger working for a power-hungry papacy.
