The Glossa ordinaria compiled by Bernard of Parma (d. 1266) on Pope Gregory IX’s 1234 Decretales, commonly known as the Liber extra, is among the most influential canon law commentaries during the High and Late Middle Ages. Interrogating this source, this dissertation examines the legal status of selected marginal religious groups in medieval Europe—apostates, heretics, Jews, Muslims, and practitioners of magic. Soon after its emergence, Bernard’s Glossa was studied by law school students—that is, future Church judges, lawyers, inquisitors, and even popes—from the mid-thirteenth century on, and was the standard commentary copied into the margins of manuscripts of the Decretales. Yet, modern scholarship ignores this source almost entirely. This study treats this issue through transcription, translation, comparison, and analysis of texts from selected medieval manuscripts of the Decretales and the Glossa, including the earliest surviving exemplars (c. 1240). It explicates the Romano-canonical judicial terminology and principles employed by the Glossa. Furthermore, it scrutinizes the Glossa’s manner of using legal allegations and tracks the excerpts which it inherits from commentarial literature. Finally, it examines how the Glossa treats the selected marginal religious groups, and thus uncovers how this source can serve as a window for us into medieval society from the perspective of the learned or academic law. More broadly, this work contributes to a fuller understanding of the development of medieval canonical science, the operation of the ecclesiastical-legal system, and the mechanism through which the institutional Church defined its own religious boundaries.

The Glossa ordinaria on the Bible stands as one of the prime achievements of the period in western intellectual history known as the Renaissance of the twelfth century. In spite of the great number of still extant manuscripts very little is known about the circumstances around its composition. This state of affairs is partly explained by the lack of modern and critical editions of the books of the Glossa ordinaria. The present work is the first critical edition of the Glossa ordinaria on the Book of Lamentations, and consists of the forewords, or prothemata, and the first book (of five) of this text, which was compiled early in the twelfth century by the theologian and Ciceronian rhetorician Gilbert the Universal (†1134), schoolmaster at Auxerre and subsequently Bishop of London. The introduction includes a background sketch of the environment in which the Glossa ordinaria was conceived – the school of Laon – with a short biography of Gilbert the Universal, as well as a study of the sources to this particular part of the Gloss, chief among them the ninth-century commentary of Paschasius Radbertus. It is shown that Gilbert’s major improvement to his source, apart from drastically rewriting it, consists of the introduction of Ciceronian rhetorical loci to the verses of Lamentations. The introduction furthermore provides the reader with an analysis of the manuscript tradition of the early twelfth century and a selective analysis of the later manuscript tradition (some 86 manuscripts have so far been traced). One of the conclusions reached is that the Gloss on Lamentations exists in two textual recensions, the one original, the other a later redaction made once the Gloss had become a success and preserved in nearly all the later manuscripts. The manuscripts of the first recension, which is the one edited in the present work, may be organised into a stemma codicum consisting of two major families originating in a single archetype. It is possible to reconstruct this archetype on the basis of the five oldest manuscripts. An English translation of the edited text is included, as well as a ‘semi-critical’ edition of the text of the second recension. An important part of the present work consists of an effort to combine the sophisticated mise-en-page of the glossed manuscripts with the standards of presentation to be expected of a modern critical edition.