For a long time, this blog has been heavy on the questions
and light on the answers. We've taken tour upon tour of Pseudo-Isidore's
contents, I've reviewed famous problems, and I've discussed the going theories.
All the while, I've been doing my own reading and developing my own theories.
These efforts have been represented here more in the delays between posts than
in the content I've pounded out. After the longest such delay, corresponding to my most
substantial piece of work yet on Pseudo-Isidore (more on that soon), I returned to announce that
this blog would be a little different from here on out. It will incorporate more of my own ideas. It will run afoul of Wikipedian prohibitions regarding Original Research. Consider yourself warned.
For a few months now, I've been pulling together materials
for a substantial article on The Date of Pseudo-Isidore. For a long time, I've become aware of a small historiographical problem: Since the mid
nineteenth century, people have been noticing curious parallels between Pseudo-Isidorian
concepts and theories and actual ninth-century historical events. This has encouraged more
than a few historians to draw conclusions about Pseudo-Isidore’s date. Despite
all of these keen observations, enduring consensus on dating has been hard to
establish, in part (I would argue) because nobody has attempted a systematic
survey of contemporary events and Pseudo-Isidore’s contents. It seemed to me
that such a survey promised not only to bring out positive parallels, but to
indicate where parallels did not exist. That is, once all the necessary
homework had been done, one could not only say—hey look, Pseudo-Isidore
condemns coerced episcopal confessions, and that’s what some people complained
happened to Ebo of Reims in 835! One could also say: Hey look, Pseudo-Isidore
loves to complain about coerced episcopal confessions, and the only attested case between 800 and 870 involves Ebo of Reims. The
latter sort of statement strikes me as a great deal more powerful, and more
important for trying to understand what Pseudo-Isidore is all about.
The original plan was therefore to develop a systematic approach to what Pseudo-Isidore says and what was happening in Pseudo-Isidore’s
world (broadly speaking), with a view towards comparing the two. I’ve been
collecting all the information I can on all judicial processes initiated
against bishops from the later eighth century to around 870 (when the long form
of Pseudo-Isidore is cited for the first time, our first long-form manuscripts
appear, and we can be absolutely certain that all work on the forgery had
ceased). This has turned out to be relatively easy, because our sources don’t
attest to very many processes, and for most of them our information is very
thin. Also since the beginning of last month, I’ve been (re-)reading every last
Pseudo-Isidorian decretal forgery and synthesizing all the material on judicial
process to be found in each one: Everything on who can accuse, whether and when
accusations are to be brought before judges, how appeals are to occur, every
last statement on the exceptio spolii and
peregrina iudicia—you get the idea.
This has naturally turned out to be a great deal more work. Now, however, I’m
nearing the end of the collection phase, and I have systematic notes on what is
actually happening, at a judicial level, in Pseudo-Isidore’s world (as far as
we can tell); and I also have rather more copious (and thus messier) but still
more or less systematic notes on Pseudo-Isidore’s judicial
prescriptions.
Gradually, in the midst of all this reading and note-taking,
a basic theory of Pseudo-Isidore and his purpose began to take root in my mind.
It is not a new theory. Others have had versions of this idea before.
Nevertheless, it cuts against some of the recent post-Zechiel-Eckes consensus—a
consensus that I have, myself, subscribed to and furthered. And I have
uncovered additional (and I believe, fairly conclusive) points in its favor, while
learning to appreciate its explanatory power. It’s now looking like my article on
The Date of Pseudo-Isidore will need more attention than I can give it in the
remaining month of summer. In the meantime, I thought I'd slap up an outline of my thought here on teh blog.
We might as well begin at the beginning, with
Pseudo-Isidore’s date.
Until the last decade, Paul Hinschius was responsible for
the reigning orthodoxy on the date of the Pseudo-Isidorian forgeries. The
Hinschian argument, repeated by Emil Seckel and later Horst Fuhrmann, is the
sort of thing that looks airtight at first: The false capitularies of
Benedictus Levita carry a preface that mentions Archbishop Otgar and calls him
the former bishop of Mainz. We know that Otgar died in office in 847, so
suddenly we have a terminus post quem for the false capitularies in their final
form. And, according to Hinschius, the forged decretals of Isidorus Mercator
use the false capitularies of Benedictus Levita as a source. So Pseudo-Isidore
must postdate 847. And then when you start looking at reception, you find that
the first direct Pseudo-Isidorian citations occur possibly in 852, certainly in
857. Thus the conventional date for the forged decretals is given in many an
article as 847–852/7.
As I said, airtight at first, but porous upon closer
inspection. First of all, the contents of Benedictus Levita need not postdate 847 just because the preface does. Second of all, it’s not at all clear that
Pseudo-Isidore used Benedictus Levita as a source. At least not exactly. It’s
perhaps more accurate to say that the two collections have a fair amount of
material—much of it genuine, a few little bits and pieces of it forged—in
common. After long and tedious investigations, I’ve begun to think of Benedictus Levita, at base, as something like
a thinly disguised florilegium of mostly-genuine legal material. It has some
Pseudo-Isidorian elements, but for long stretches it’s just somebody’s enormous
pile of random legal flotsam and jetsam. It certainly seems that Pseudo-Isidore
availed himself of some portions of this monumental collection of favorite quotations. Genuine sources, in particular, recur in
Pseudo-Isidore, complete with Benedictus Levita’s alterations and truncations.
It also seems that the Pseudo-Isidorians, at some point, took this enormous
legal florilegium, slapped on a preface, and did some light editing to make the
whole thing look, however superficially, like a collection of capitulary
legislation. So I would date the thin capitulary veneer after 847. The contents, though—who knows?
Now we saw a long time ago that much of the recent
discussion of Pseudo-Isidore has been guided, in manners direct and indirect,
by several articles that Klaus Zechiel-Eckes published about a decade ago. In
these articles, Zechiel-Eckes proved that the Pseudo-Isidorian forgers used
Corbie’s library, and he argued that work on the forgeries took place in the
wake of Ebo of Reims’s deposition; an initial batch of forged decretals, he argued,
was drafted between 836 and 838.
To place Pseudo-Isidore in the 830s, he first turned to Florus
of Lyons, the mischievous deacon and loyal Agobard partisan on whom he’d
written his learned Habilitationschrift (published
in 1998, and highly recommended reading). Florus was instrumental in getting
the liturgist, scholar and sometime bishop Amalarius accused of heresy at the
Council of Quierzy in 838. In the months before this council convened, Florus
dashed off a letter to key participants complaining that Amalarius sought to
support his heretical teachings “through the forged authority of many pontiffs.”
Zechiel-Eckes also noted Hincmar of Reims’s famous remark to his namesake and
nephew, Hincmar of Laon, around the year 869. When the latter quoted
Pseudo-Isidore to his uncle, the elder Hincmar claimed that he was already
familiar with the texts, and had been
since before the younger Hincmar was even conceived. Zechiel-Eckes notes
that Hincmar of Laon was most likely born between 835 and 838, and certainly
before 840. Some portion of the forged decretals, he argues, were thus already
in circulation by 838; two independent sources attest to this fact. Since
Zechiel-Eckes accepted (following Hinschius), that the latest source used in
the decretal forgers were the acta of
the 836 council of Aachen, the date range seemed clear: The forgery workshop produced
an initial installment of decretal forgeries between 836 and 838.
Unfortunately, nobody has been willing to lean on
Zechiel-Eckes’s terminus ante quem of 838. Florus’s letter is suggestive, but
the forgeries he's talking about could really be anything--including objects of Florus's own imagination (or dishonesty). There is, moreover, very little in Pseudo-Isidore
to support or defend Amalarius’s controversial teachings. Also notably lacking
is any widespread willingness to see Hincmar’s statement to his nephew as anything
but rhetorical exaggeration. Hincmar’s remarks also have to be read in the
context of similar statements made by Pope Nicholas I in 864/5. Confronted by Pseudo-Isidorian texts in the
course of the controversy over Hincmar of Laon, Nicholas declared that these
statutes had been conserved in the archives of the Roman church since antiquity.
Such statements do indeed suggest volumes about the early reception of
Pseudo-Isidore. I hope to say more about them and what they mean at some point
in the not-too-distant future. But I don’t think they’re helpful for the matter
of dating.
As if that weren't enough, the terminus post quem of 836 has also collapsed, since Gerhard Schmitz
pointed out that there is little reason, if any, to assume that the
Pseudo-Isidorians ever saw the acta of
the 836 Council of Aachen. The bishops gathered at Aachen just repeated a lot
of points articulated at the 829 Council of Paris, which our forgers also knew.
This pushes the terminus back a full seven years, to 829—or perhaps only six
years, as there is some indication that our forgers were also acquainted with a
letter that Hrabanus Maurus wrote on the subject of chorbishops, in response to
the 829 council, no earlier than 830.
So, some of Zechiel-Eckes’s arguments on the dating front have
faced problems. Nevertheless, the general re-dating from ca. 850 to ca. 835 has
been widely accepted. In part, this testifies to the weakness of the older
Hinschian dating scheme, but it also indicates the strength of Zechiel-Eckes’s
arguments in another arena. Certain aspects of Pseudo-Isidore’s forgery
program, Zechiel-Eckes showed, appear to address the plight of Ebo of Reims
after his deposition at Thionville in 835. My own reading over the past few
years has turned up much more evidence in favor of this point. In subsequent posts, we will see that it is simply
undeniable that the Pseudo-Isidorian forgeries reference again and again, in
ways sometimes strikingly explicit and sometimes studiously indirect, the
deposition of Ebo from his see at Reims in 835, with a view towards rendering
the conclusions of the council invalid and thus (it would seem) compelling Ebo’s reinstatement. And
more recently, another scholar, Steffen Patzold, has emphasized the degree to
which the Pseudo-Isidorian agenda is indebted to the reform ideology
promulgated at the 829 Council of Paris. Indeed, the more reading I’ve done,
the more I’ve come to appreciate that Pseudo-Isidore may not have used the 836
Council of Aachen, but that our favorite forgers and the bishops gathered at Aachen in 836 were engaged in quite similar projects: To varying degrees, both were trying to
pick up the threads of church reform that had been abandoned in the political
turmoil of the early 830s.
A very interesting series. Thanks very much!
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