Volume 110, Issue 1

The question if it is possible to speak of “Geltungsformen des Rechts” for the period between ca. 1050 and ca. 1150, will usually be answered with ‘no’, since it was not clear what was generally enforced. The intensive research of the last decades has shown that there was little canonistic activity coordinated from Rome. Instead, both compilers and users of canon law collections pursued their own interests and needs arising from pastoral care. That resulted in various forms of reception and transmission of the normative texts. What was constant throughout the period was the fact that the authority as such of canon law was taken for granted, even if individual texts were at times ignored. This consensus found its expression in the idea that the Holy Spirit was the ultimate author of the sacred canons. The present paper deals with the role of this idea by analyzing four letters of Petrus Damiani and their influence on later thinkers up to ca. 1150.

In public worships of the middle ages the communicative structures come into closer consideration when a ritual act is of relevance to the theology of the sacraments or to juridical implications. In these cases the spoken language seems to be of eminent importance, because the ritual initializes, strengthens or blesses (or cancels) a canonical status. Both a sacral language and a metaphorical text can create misunderstandings or errors. So interests and intentions have to be investigated in an examination or in the form of a dialogue, when ‘Amen’ as a simply answer is not sufficient. The dialogue during the ritual of baptism here is used as an example.

This paper analyzes the juridical issues concerning the material reparation of churches and sacred objects after the Iconoclastic Fury in 1566–1567, based on the works of Petrus Peckius (1529–1589). The Fury left an unprecedented path of destruction in many towns of the Low Countries. It presented society not only with political and religious challenges but also with a myriad of legal ones. As a Leuven law professor in this time of chaos, Peckius published the treatise “De sacrosanctis et catholicis Christi ecclesiis reparandis ac reficiendis” (1573). Peckius’ take on the theme reveals an intricate analysis of the varied circumstances of destruction, the means of funding the repairs, and the liability of different actors – from the perpetrators of the destruction themselves to the prelate, the parishioners, and even town magistrates. After an initial overview of the Iconoclastic Fury and a brief biographical note on Peckius and his works, this paper will present Peckius’ ideas in a ‘timeline’ of three phases: going, respectively, from the assessment of damages and planning the extent of restoration; to considerations on liability; and, finally, to the juridical means of enforcement. Along with each phase, we provide critical reflections on Peckius’ influences and positions in the context of the Iconoclastic Fury.

The article is dedicated to the encounters between medieval canon law and modernity in the 19 th century. It analyzes the influence of medieval law, especially of matrimonial law, the instrumentalization of the Investiture Controversy in the political debate, and the influence of these debates on the study of medieval canon law.

The protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the central figure in the history of church and theology in the 19 th century, can be seen as a pioneer of democratic structures in state and church. During the period of the Prussian Reforms he had occasion to realize his theological ideas. In his sermons he appealed to Christians to actively participate in shaping the state. He drafted a constitution for the Protestant church in Prussia, in which leading offices were to be filled by elections. In his academic lectures he made clear that he wanted the political influence of the monarch to be severely limited in favour of democratic participation of citizens in legislation and administration. In his political sermons of those years he did not spare criticism of the king’s political decisions. The measure of this criticism was the will of the nation which the monarch has to represent.

Since the late eighteenth century German conservatism – conveyed primarily by Prussians – was imbued with certain reactionary ideas, but at the same time did not deny the importance of changes in state and society. Conservatives recognized the irreversibility of the Reform Era that followed the defeat by Napoleon, and the need to accommodate changes required for the survival and development of a unified German state. One of the major challenges they had to face in this context was the rising concept of nationalism and the efforts to establish a German nation-state. This article argues, however, that until the 1848 Revolution, conservatives formulated a political theology which aimed to respond to the growing German national movement and the gradual spread of popular national sentiment. Such a response was neither anti-modern nor an outright denial of nationalism. Rather, many of the conservatives, who were associated with the reemergence of Christian Pietism, namely neo-Pietists, sought to accommodate nationalism by forging a religious-national synthesis that invested the people with the task of representing the essence and true spirit of the ‚Deutsche Nation‘ For these Christian devotees, the Volk had an organic identity that defined the national state. And while according to the conservative theory the people were not to be entrusted with full sovereignty, in fact they formed a German nation that eventually – especially during the 1848 Revolution – won certain political rights. The conservative religious-national synthesis, which advocated confessional reconciliation within German Christianity, introduced a specific democratic concept of the nation based on the people’s identity and solidarity as the core of the nation. It was embedded in the ideal of the ‚Christlicher Staaf‘.

The article examines the genesis of Prussian Conservatism in general and its models of representation rooting in a concept of ‘Protestant freedom’ in particular. By focusing on Conservatives’ adaption of concepts of party and freedom in the first half of the nineteenth century, the article shows that conservative adaption of contemporary political language and concepts was not a mere attempt of regaining dominance in public discourse but was rooted in specific concepts of Christian and Protestant thought. The article shows that conservative models of representation and participation are primarily not motivated by an opposition to liberal political thought but first of all the result of a politicisation of religious thought.

In the period of political repression up to the revolution of 1848–1849, private societies (Vereine) functioned as a surrogate for public life. The Gustav-Adolf-Verein, created to support diaspora communities, united protestants of different convictions, including clergy and believers who considered the traditional structures of the Prussian church insufficient to answer the needs of modern society. Among them were rationalists deemed heretics by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. By means of his Patent of Toleration issued in 1847, the king attempted to squeeze the rationalists, called ‘Lichtfreunde’, out of his church, arguing that they were free to form new congregations (freie Gemeinden). Their training in public debate made several of the rationalist clergymen obvious candidates for the parliamentary bodies that came into life during the revolution of 1848–1849. Most of them were considered to be “democrats”.

During the Premarch era, the provincial diets in Prussia did not gain much reputation as political institutions of influence. All the deputies were land owners and as such represented only a small fraction of the Prussian population. Even more, the nobility clearly dominated the estate assemblies, while town representatives and peasants were eager to have a say, too. The paper argues, however, that the diets of all eight Prussian provinces struggled to subsequently win general esteem and a politicized self-image. Although they debated mostly local and regional matters, they can be interpreted as protoparliamentary. In this regard, the most important issue involved was the emancipation of the Jews. During the 1820s and 1830s, all classes of property owners were united by a religious and economical prejudice against the Jews. Only during the 1840s, at least some representatives welcomed civil equality of the Jews. The common fight against Jewish emancipation helped to shape a political consciousness prior to the revolution of 1848.

In Jülich-Cleve-Berg-Mark, the Reformed and Lutheran churches had been governed almost independently by synods since the 17 th century. With the establishment of the Prussian western provinces in 1815, however, consistories were installed alongside, whose legal claims competed with those of the existing synods; these, however, tried tenaciously to preserve their traditional rights. Considerations that this ecclesiastical demand correlated with contemporary democratic thought and its demand for a state constitution were vehemently rejected in the Prussian West for theological reasons.

The paper shows that the Prussian General Synod of 1846 was a learning ground in which oratory practices were tested that parliamentarism in Prussia would take up. The General Synod created oratorical procedures that fostered the development of a consensus-based communication regime. At the same time, the General Synod tested a culture of debate that became decisive for parliamentary debate in Prussia. Formats of synodal negotiation created the speech-cultural basis for later working parliamentarism. This was also due to the influence of the presbyterial-synodal traditions that the two western provinces of Prussia brought to the synodal negotiations. This cultural transfer from West to East succeeded above all because Rhenish synod members – such as the Bonn theology professor Nitzsch – left their mark on the deliberations of the General Synod.

The Prussian General Synod of 1846 has been understood as the ecclesiastical precursor of the Vereinigte Landtag of 1847. This essay argues that the General Synod was rather convened by the king on the model of the “Vereinigte Ausschüsse “ of 1842. To the extent granted to them by the rules of procedure, the synodals adopted democratic ideas and practices within the limits of their “Ständebewußtsein”, widely viewed them critically in the church, and vehemently rejected them in the political context.

This article examines the place of the United Diet in Prussia of 1847 in the history of Prussian-German democracy, which should also be seen in the context of the “spirit of religion”. In doing so, the article will show that the United Landtag resulted on the one hand from the religious monarchical understanding of the state, and on the other hand from the shift in focus of the Prussian old conservatives from church to state politics. The focus is on the party-building processes of the liberal opposition and the conservative defenders of the monarchical system, showing that for the latter the importance of the United Landtag lies primarily as a space of experience for the revolutionary and “reactionary” period that followed in 1848.

The three manuscripts Mainz, Prague, and Vatican of the Summa Antiquitate et tempore [SAT] preserve a commentary on Distinctiones 11–101 that has been widely regarded as a revised form of Rufinus’ Summa based on the SAT. Thus the commentary is called ‘Pseudo-Rufinus’. From this point of view, it is of little value for a critical edition of the SAT. However, a close inspection reveals that the issues concerning the relationship between the SAT and the Pseudo-Rufinus are not at all settled. Two important questions still remain open, i.e., (1) what the Rufinus manuscripts on which the SAT and the Pseudo-Rufinus are based looked like, and (2) how the manuscripts of the SAT and the Pseudo-Rufinus relate to each other. Starting from these questions, the present paper argues that the SAT is based on a Pseudo-Rufinus manuscript, and the Pseudo-Rufinus manuscripts represent earlier stages of the SAT before a large-scale reworking of the former into the latter based on the Summa of Stephen of Tournai (1165/1166) and the Summa Parisiensis. That puts the Pseudo-Rufinus in the 1160s. At about the same time while the author worked on the SAT, the Summa of Johannes Faventinus became available. It was used in Paris by 1172. The SAT, too, must have been finished by that time. That may also explain the reason why the SAT enjoyed such a modest manuscript tradition.