Excerptiones Egberti

Title	Excerptiones Egberti
Key	?
Alternative title	Excerptiones Pseudo-Egberti
Alternative title	Excerptiones de libris canonicis (Wormald)
Alternative title	Wulfstan's canon law collection (Cross/Hamer)
Alternative title	Collectio canonum Wigorniensis (Elliot)
Wikidata Item no.	Q16827379
Century	saec. XI
European region of origin	England
Author	Christof Rolker
No. of manuscripts	some (2–9)

The Excerptiones are an Anglo-Saxon canon law collection extant in five manuscripts. Content, structure, and wording of the material differ considerably between the extant manuscripts. The traditional attribution to Egbert of York has long been dismissed. Instead, the collection is generally accepted to be closely associated with Wulfstan of York (successively bishop of Worcester, London, and York), though it remains uncertain which role he had in the making of which version.

Title

The collection traditionally is known as Excerptiones Egberti. This goes back to Spelman's 1639 editio princeps, where the collection is found, along other materials, under the heading Excerptiones d. Egberti Eboracensis Archiepiscopi (Google books has a digital copy, see here for p. 258). In two manuscripts, a similar title is found (Excerptiones de libris canonicis).

While the attribution of the collection to Archbishop Egbert of York (d. 766), the first archbishop of York, has long been refuted, the traditional title Excerptiones Egberti is still used today, although various other names have also been proposed.

Content and sources

As far as scholarship agrees which materials are part of the Excerptiones it can be described as a collection that goes back to some 100 pieces, often taken from Carolingian penitential and canon law works. Sexuality and marriage are prominent topics, as are the duties of the clergy.

The known formal sources include the Quadripartitus, the Collectio Vetus Gallica, and a number of penitentials.

Manuscripts

Kéry, Collections p. 239 lists two manuscripts of the first recension (Cambridge, Parker Library, 190 and London, British Library, Cotton Nero A.i), three manuscripts of the second recension (Cambridge, Parker Library, 265, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Barlow 37, and Rouen, BM, U.109 (CGM 1382)) plus a fragment of an unspecified version (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 121; not mentioned by Elliot). All manuscripts come from Worcester or are connected to Wulfstan in some way.

Scholarship

The collection is a notable canonical collection in itself, and especially noteworthy as a very rare example of a Latin canon law collection compiled in Anglo-Saxon England. Accordingly, it has attracted much scholarly attention ever since 1693, both from legal scholars and from Anglo-Saxonists. The text of the editio princeps has been reprinted several times, and edited anew by Thorpe in 1840, Aronstam in 1974 (unpublished), and James E. Cross and Andrew Hamer in 1999. None of these editions presents exactely the same version of the collection, and only the 1999 edition is based on all manuscripts known today.

Building on Aronstam in particular, Cross/Hamer established that the longer version depended on the shorter, more stable version; they remained neutral on the exact role of Wulfstan, but argued for his influence, whether direct or indirect, in the evolution of the collection. Elliot (who ciriticised the 1999 edition as "highly unsatisfactory") argued that on account of the stability of the first recension it should not be seen as Wulfstan's work, while the very instability of the second was indicative of his involvement; he argued at length that the variety of the manuscripts, including the combination with different materials were a feature, not a bug.

Literature

Kéry, Collections pp. 238-239.- Wulfstan’s canon law collection, ed. and tr. J.E. Cross/A. Hamer (Cambridge, 1999).- Elliot, Canon Law esp. Appendices V and X-XIII.- Patrick Wormald†, Archbishop Wulfstan’s Canon Law Collection, ed. Andrew Rabin. The Old English Newsletter, v. 46, no. 1 (2016).- Elliot, The Worcester Collection of Canons: The Need for a New Edition, in: Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Toronto, 5–11 August 2012, ed. Dusil/Goering/Thier (2016) pp. 1-29.- Rolker, Canon law p. 18.

Weblinks

Michael Elliot, who has studied the collection in great detail in his PhD thesis (Toronto 2013), has published transcriptions of four of the five manuscripts, an analysis of the collection, and the text of his paper at the 2014 International Congress of Medieval Canon Law (shorter than the published version):

http://individual.utoronto.ca/michaelelliot/manuscripts/texts/wig.html

His thesis, which also contains transcriptions and analyses, remained unpublished, but is available in digital format online. For an archived version, see the Internet Archive.