Secular canons in Medieval Europe: Diversity under Common Canon Law

While both regular canons and monasticism with its development into different orders have reached a roughly even level of coverage in research, the history of secular canons is a field which has hitherto been far less in focus of historian scholarship. This might be due to the fact that they did not form orders or congregations offering a systematic approach to their institutions. Hence the pieces of research carried out so far mostly deal with a single cathedral or collegiate chapter and do not expand on the phenomenon in general. Likewise, the present publication may not give a comprehensive survey but yet takes a comparative approach by regarding the establishment of secular canons in a European longitudinal section from the Polar Circle to Southern Italy. In this course, both cathedral and collegiate chapters in Scandinavian, German, Polish and Italian territories and the respective career paths canons took into them will be considered. In this course, the essays take only some brief recourses to the early middle ages, when canons maintained a cloistered vita communis, but rather turn their view to those centuries in the high and later middle ages up to reformation times, when the chapters reached their full implementation.

The essays collected in this volume base on a session series held at the International Medieval Congress 2018 in Leeds. The contributors are renowned historians in this field: Antonio Antonetti (Caserta), Anna Minara Ciardi (Stockholm), Emanuele Curzel (Trento), Sigrun Høgetveit Berg (Tromsø), Jochen Johrendt (Wuppertal), Anna Kowalska-Pietrzak (Łódź), Arnold Otto (Nürnberg), Kirsi Salonen (Turku), Jörg Wunschhofer (Beckum).