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Shaping Church Law around the Year 1000: The Decretum of Burchard of Worms. By Greta Austin. [Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2009- Pp. xii, 344. $124.95. ISBN 978-0754-65091-1.)
This book presents a fundamental reinterpretation of an important collection of church law from the 1010s: the Decretum of Burchard, bishop of Worms. Like most canon law collections before the Decretum of Gratian (c. 1140), Burchard's book contains the text of many laws but no commentary in the compiler's own voice. Modern scholars have thus understood it as a simple storehouse of texts with a point of view, to be sure, but not much in the way of an argument. At the same time, they have been puzzled by Burchard's willingness to falsify his texts by changing their wording or attribution.
Greta Austin is now able to show that...