write an essay on Medieval Europe - Raise of Christianity -Introduction to Medieval Period -Jesus Christ and his teachings -monasteries
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LAW AND RELIGION: LAW AND RELIGION IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE
The distinctive relationship between law and religion is one of the main features of the Western political tradition. The origins can be traced, in part, to a set of principles incorporated in the corpus of the Roman law and its later medieval developments. The legal status of religion and religious institutions in Roman public law was defined by a set of principles and rules regulating the use of sacred buildings and the status of priests and magistrates. By the time of the compilations of all the Roman laws under the emperor Justinian in sixth-century Byzantium, Christianity had given a new meaning to law and religious relations. Legal rules and religious norms developed in a symbiotic environment. Outside the Byzantine Empire, however, the Western part of Christendom was no longer ruled by Roman law. Rome had ceased to be the capital of an empire. The memory of its past imperial glory rested now on the claims of Peter's successors at the head of the Catholic Church. The people newly established inside the frontiers of the former empire followed their own law and customs. The revival of the concept of empire during the Carolingian Renaissance had little consequence for the existing systems of customary law. With the many obstacles faced by the church in the early Middle Ages, interest in Roman law declined.
In the eleventh century, the vast intellectual movement of the Gregorian Reform restored the church's discipline and its authority. The Gregorian Reform also generated a renewed interest for the texts of the church's legal tradition But in their search for the texts suitable to their purpose, the reformers, with perhaps the exception of Ivo of Chartres (c. 1040–1115), rarely bothered to harmonize the contradictions found in the texts then collected in their compilations. They chose instead simply to suppress the texts which did not support their own conclusions. While the reformers did provide the intellectual impulse for the reinterpretation of the spiritual foundations of the ecclesiastical institutions, sacramental law as understood by the reformers did not aim at the construction of a unified juridical order. They focused on the defense of the spiritual and pastoral nature of the church's mission and the function of its clergy. The legal revolution came later, once the long forgotten compilations of Justinian were rediscovered in the West.
The rediscovery of Justinian's compilations in northern Italy and the resulting exegesis of Roman legal texts brought about dramatic changes. Within a few decades, the renewal of jurisprudence gave rise to a novel legal culture (c. 1130). As the teaching of the first generations of jurists spread outside the limited circle of the schools, the new legal reason attracted a larger audience. By the turn of the twelfth century, princes and prelates, teachers and students, judges and lawyers, merchants and clergymen were readily using the new law. But to these men, law was more than a technical tool. An image of a prestigious past, it was also described as the ratio scripta and a mode of thinking encompassing the whole field of human affairs, both secular and sacred. The new law transformed feudal society and shaped forever the legal tradition of Western Europe. Viewed as the legacy of the former empire, the new law was clearly distinguished from religion at a time when the conflict between the popes and the heirs of the Holy Roman Empire divided medieval Europe. Yet the practices and belief of a deeply religious medieval society could not but influence the definition and the perception of the legal norms in both the private and the public spheres. In turn, legal reasoning would also contribute to shaping religious doctrine. This combination would be achieved by the new canonical jurisprudence within a few decades.