Open AccessThe construction of auctoritas in Gratian's Decretum: the role of tradition and the auctor in a 12th century legal text
Author(s) -
Carolina Gual da Silva
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
revista de história
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.104
H-Index - 3
eISSN - 2316-9141
pISSN - 0034-8309
DOI - 10.11606/issn.2316-9141.rh.2022.181491
Subject(s) - articulation (sociology) , originality , middle ages , classics , law , sociology , history , literature , political science , ancient history , art , creativity , politics
This paper discusses the construction of authority in the 12th century using a specific case, that of Gratian’s Decretum, a legal manual compiled around 1140 in Western Europe. Through a methodology of intertextual analysis, this article combines theoretical work from major authors and primary sources to advance an explanation on how authority can be understood during the central Middle Ages in legal texts and how it comes from an articulation between tradition and originality. Furthermore, we highlight how the intersections between innovation and tradition in the Decretum make it possible for us to consider Gratian as an auctor. From this analysis, we extrapolate a broader conclusion about how legal texts in the 12th and 13th centuries used and then recreated a notion of authority that came to include the idea of the author who, in his turn, became an authority himself.