Atto of San Marco, Brevarium canonum

Atto, cardinal priest of the titular church San Marco at Rome, compiled shortly after 1073 a breviary of canon law for his clerics. It is the first truly Roman collection of the century. Atto had been elected archbishop of Milan in 1072 by the Patarini faction, but he was not accepted by the imperialist and aristocratic factions and was forced to flee. He spent most of the rest of his life as cardinal at the church of San Marco. Apparently the Liber decretorum of Burchard was available to the clerics of his church, but Atto disapproved of its use because it contained apocryphal texts and because it contained canons from concilia trasmarina which, if at all authentic, were valid only locally. Only those canons have general validity, he said, which have been approved by the pope. Since his clerics were too poor to travel and had no one else to teach them, he felt obliged to provide them with a brief collection in which the texts of the canons were condensed. The present analysis is based on the copy in the Ms Vat. lat. 586 (AM), which is the only surviving copy. The sources are the pseudoisidorian decretals and the letters of popes Gelasius I, Gregory I and Nicholas I. Conciliar canons from the Dionysio-Hadriana tradition are used, but are subordinate to the decretals. Series of the canons from the collection were used by Anselm of Lucca and Deusdedit and by Placidus of Nonantola for the Liber de honore ecclesie he composed circa 1111.

Literature

For the edition see Angelo Mai, Attonis cardinalis presbyteri Capitulare seu Brevarium canonum, ex Codice Vaticano, in: Scriptorum veterum nova collectio e Vaticanis codicibus edita 6. 2 (Rome 1832), pp. 60–102. The edition is also found in Migne PL 134.27–52. – Franz Pelster, Das Dekret Burkhards von Worms in einer Redaktion aus dem Beginn der gregorianischen Reform (Cod. Vat. lat. 3809 and Clm 4570), Studi Gregoriani 1 (1947), pp. 323–324, edited a part of the prologue and identified the manuscript used by Mai as Vat. lat. 586. For a translation 139 of the prologue into English see Somerville and Brasington, Prefaces, pp. 118– 121. See also Detlev Jasper, Burchards Dekret in der Sicht der Gregorianer, in: Bischof Burchard von Worms 1000–1025, ed. by Wilfried Hartmann (Mainz 2000), pp. 179–184. – For the use of the letter JE 2833 of pope Nicholas I see Robert Somerville, Pope Nicholas I and John Scottus Eriugena: JE 2833, ZRG Kan. 83 (1997), pp. 73–76. – For the use of the breviary in later collections see Fournier – Le Bras, Histoire, pp. 2.20–25. – Kéry, Canonical Collections, pp. 233–234.

Categories

• key is AM
• medium (500 to 1000 canons) collection
• from Rome
• terminus post quem 1074
• terminus ante quem 1078
• saec. XI
• analysis based on printed edition