ABSTRACT

In the Decretum's Preface, Burchard emphasized repeatedly his desire to make the collection "useful". This chapter describes how the Decretum was laid out on the page, how Burchard reordered Libri duo canons, and how he revised the terse Libri duo rubrics or invented new ones. Burchard utilized the repertoire of organizational features and scripts developed by the Carolingian scriptoria in order to "ensure ease of reference." The Vatican and Frankfurt manuscripts of the Decretum, produced at the Worms scriptorium, are remarkably clearly laid out on the page. The new Decretum rubrics provide more descriptive summaries of canons' topics than do the rubrics in Regino's collection. When Burchard wrote rubrics, he often copied them directly from the first lines of the canons. The majority of the rubrics which he wrote in the books studied echo the opening phrase of the canon, possibly because this method provided a convenient shortcut for writing almost 1,800 rubrics.