ABSTRACT
A San Francisco newspaper once published a cartoon depicting a student pondering the exam question ‘Define canon law’; his answer was ‘Don’t stand in front of the cannon’.2 Of course, the right answer is the law of the Church and, for this chapter’s purposes, specifically the medieval Western Church, but the student’s answer is not entirely misleading. In recent decades, scholarship on medieval canon law has increasingly resembled a battlefield, where long-held assumptions have been contested and rival hypotheses advanced, mostly in amicable skirmishes, but sometimes in divisive and unresolved debates. Some historical figures in the field, especially Gratian, the so-called ‘Father of Western Canon Law’, have even undergone identity crises, as their biographies have been rewritten. This chapter aims to explain the principal debates and how they are radically reshaping our understanding of the subject. The subject matters since canon law touched on so many aspects of medieval life, ranging from sex and marriage to property and commerce, and had a significant impact on medieval Christians through the Church courts and other means; so understanding medieval canon law and modern debates surrounding it are fundamental to understanding medieval Christianity itself.
