ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part presents issues of canon law and textual transmission from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries. It examines the transmission of the Council of Sardica's canon 13 on the 'cursus honorum', the canonical requirement of promotion through a sequence or series of ordinations, over the longue duree, from the fourth to the thirteenth centuries. The part focuses on an interesting late ninth-century Homilia sacra, and provides the first modern critical edition of the text. It explores, with some striking examples of how texts were quite spectacularly corrupted through scribal error or ignorance, the transmission of a new excerpt from Charlemagne's Capitulare generate, the influence of which was rather minimal apart from the Collection in Five Books and its derivatives.
