The Salzburg Codex: An Episcopal Handbook for Care of Souls and Church Management, c. 900–1025

Abstract

This dissertation provides the first full-length treatment of the “Salzburg Codex” (Salzburg, Erzabtei St. Peter, Benediktinerstift, Bibliothek, a.IX.32) since the late nineteenth century. The codex is an edited volume that contains 218 folios of various texts, including canon law collections, penitentials, pamphlets, conciliar decrees, and others. This manuscript has received sporadic scholarship because of its puzzling array of contents and its murky provenance. This study provides clarity on this enigmatic manuscript and places it within its cultural, religious, and political framework as an artifact of the long tenth century. It also evaluates how the canonical knowledge in the Salzburg Codex was likely used and valued. Chapter 2 presents the history of Salzburg with an emphasis on its religious, cultural, and political development from the Roman period up to the eleventh century. Chapter 3 details the codex’s contents and organization before tracking the codex’s codicological and developmental historiography. This chapter argues that the Salzburg Codex was an episcopal handbook designed and compiled in Salzburg between 950 and 1007. Chapter 4 continues this in-depth textual analysis and examines the codex’s component texts as parts of a comprehensive handbook which was intentionally assembled to assist archbishops perform their duties. Chapter 5 analyzes the many reader marks found within the manuscript–also known as nota bene annotations–to speculate how the handbook and its contents might have been used. This chapter explains what errors the archbishops were concerned with correcting in their church, and demonstrates how canon law texts were meant to inform the organization of the church and the regulation of its ordained members, even as early as the long tenth century. Chapter 6 continues this analysis of the lived experience of archbishops using their episcopal handbook by examining three cases where the Salzburg Codex may have been used to construct and deliver legal arguments and enact reform. Chapter 7 places the Salzburg Codex within the context of an active intellectual network of canonical knowledge and texts in the long tenth century, and characterizes Salzburg as one node in an active network producing canonical knowledge in the Ottonian realm.