Pope Leo of Bourges, clerical immunity and the early medieval secular

This article investigates the early medieval secular through the lens of clerical immunity – that is, the legal exemption of clerics from courts labelled as secular. It focusses on a short text, eventually attributed to Pope Leo, which was written in fifth‐century Gaul to define this immunity. By pursuing this text’s fate as it was revised and put to use into the eleventh century, the article demonstrates how the early medieval secular was a religious category employed for different purposes at different times.

modernity). 2 This perspective is broadly reflected in the recent historiography, which focusses either on Augustine's short-lived notion of the secular in late antiquity, or on the role of Gregorian Reform in beginning a slow secularization of political authority. 3 These discrete approaches are spared from intersecting by the six early medieval centuries in between, which are regarded, as so often, as either too late or too early for key developments.
However, in recent years, the argument has been forcefully made across a range of fields that, far from being a neutral or universal category, the secular is in reality 'a historically produced idea', and, furthermore, one that encodes a disguised theology. 4 As a consequence, 'to tell a story of secularism is to simultaneously render its Christian underpinnings visible'. 5 This scholarship has significant implications for the early Middle Ages. If we should be searching for the secular within a religious frame rather than outside it, then that renders the period an immediately more plausible and appealing field of enquiry.
This article therefore seeks to shed light on the early medieval secular in the neglected centuries between St Augustine and Pope Gregory VII. It does so through a quite specific lens: the issue of clerical legal immunity from secular courts, sometimes known as the privilegium fori. This is not a topic that has attracted much recent historiographical attention, unlike the related but distinct issue of the scope and nature of episcopal jurisdiction (the audientia episcopalis). 6 But it was an issue that encouraged contemporaries to take an explicit position on the secular, and thus offers a useful perspective on the broader question. This article will first present a synopsis of the existing historiography on the subject, before tracing the vicissitudes of a single revealing text from the fifth to the eleventh century as a means of addressing this delicate problematic.

The historiography of clerical legal immunity in the early Middle Ages
A conventional synthesis of the early history of clerical legal immunity might run as follows. After his dramatic conversion to Christianity, Emperor Constantine I kept most clerics under the jurisdiction of Roman law for criminal matters, but he and his successors ceded some ground for bishops, though even they could still be tried in a secular court if first found guilty in a clerical one. In the eastern Roman empire, the emperors maintained this position. In the sixth-century west, however, the church began to contest the exercise of state jurisdiction. The state retained its judicial grip on clergy in the minor orders, but eventually in the Carolingian period made concessions for clergy in major orders (subdeacons, deacons and priests), though it still sought to impose punishment if they were found guilty in clerical courts. Even so, some Carolingian clerics persisted in their struggle to obtain more extensive legal immunity, with some success. From the twelfth century, however, state authorities began to clamp down again, and despite the scandal caused by Thomas Becket's murder in 1170, the rest of the Middle Ages was essentially a story of the Church in tactical retreat. Syntheses such as these are in large part the product of painstaking nineteenth-century research, such as that conducted by Paul Hinschius, on whose magisterial multi-volume study of church law the preceding 6 See, however, A. Banfi, Habent illi iudices suos: studi sull'esclusività della giurisdizione ecclesiastica e sulle origini del privilegium fori in diritto romano e bizantino (Milan, 2005), for analysis of the earlier part of the period, and A. Duggan, 'Clerical Exemption in Canon Law from Gratian to the Decretals', Medieval Worlds 6 (2017), pp. 78-100, for the situation from the twelfth century. For a recent study of pre-conquest England, see N. Marafioti, 'Secular and Ecclesiastical Justice in Anglo-Saxon England', Speculum 94 (2019), pp. 774-805 (I am grateful to Professor Marafioti for sharing her work in advance of publication). For enquiry in a comparative global frame, see the special issue of Medieval Worlds 6 (2017), 'Religious Exemption in Pre-modern Eurasia'. Michael Heil's forthcoming Clerics, Courts, and Legal Culture in Early Medieval Italy will shed light on the strategic negotiation of secular and ecclesiastical courts by clerics in an Italian context. For a landmark contextualization of the audientia episcopalis and early Christianity's wider relationship with law in late antiquity, see C. Humfress, Orthodoxy and the Courts in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2007). paragraph is based. 7 They are also, however, a product of nineteenth-century concerns and anxieties. Hinschius and others were working in the context of the Kulturkampf that raged in contemporary Germany over the place of the Catholic church within an emerging German state. 8 This debate played a key role in the emergence of classical secularization theory; 9 it also stimulated a great deal of work on the legal position of the medieval church, first in Germany and then later in France. 10 With hindsight, it is plain that for all their astonishing erudition, Hinschius and others projected the controversies of their day, in which they were very closely involved, onto the past that they studied, creating a history of the state struggling to escape and to master the church.
One of the problems was the level of systematization that their arguments assumed, which obscured profound uncertainties in the evidence. Take for instance an important law originally issued by Emperors Honorius and Theodosius II in 412, which has often been read as declaring that bishops, priests and other clerics should only be tried before bishops. As such, this law features prominently in historiographical discussions of clerical immunity. 11 Yet its precise meaning hangs on a qualifying clause that is frustratingly ambiguous. Does the crucial clause read siquidem alibi non oportet, that is, as the standard English translation has it, 'since he [the priest] must not be accused elsewhere', thus intensifying the imperial command? 12 Or does it instead read si quidem alibi non oportet, as proposed in recent French translations, with the interjection of a space watering down the imperial decree through the condition 'if really/however he should not be accused elsewhere'? 13 The second reading has seemed more plausible to those historians intent on late Roman law's legal consistency, but early medieval scribes and authors such as Florus of Lyon and Pseudo-Isidore preferred the first reading; the oldest manuscript for this part of the Theodosian Code, a sixth-century codex now in the Vatican, is written in scripta continua, and so cannot resolve the question. 14 In any case, it is not clear that an assumption of rigorous systematization is the best approach to early medieval law, which was not a defined body of material, and so did not really constitute a consistent system. 15 In view of such difficulties, seeking to update Hinschius' synthesis, or replace it with an alternative, would seem an ill-conceived endeavour. Instead of offering a fresh systematization, therefore, this article seeks out clues towards a history of early medieval clerical immunity from secular courts, by focusing on one particular text. 16 It is a decree setting out the parameters for clerics' use of secular courts that declares it was issued by Pope Leo and a Roman synod, and it runs as follows:  The authorities of the world wished such great reverence to prevail towards the sacerdotal ordereven those whom divine power had ordered to be in charge of the earth under the imperial namethat they permitted the right of deciding cases to be conferred upon the holy bishops, according to the divine constitutions. What was confirmed both in the edicts of the ancient law and many times in the enacted laws, we find in the present time to have been trampled upon by many people. For passing over the sacerdotal judgement, they move everywhere to the examination of secular people. Therefore it seemed to us that a full punishment should now avenge this insult both to the holy laws and to our order, and should establish a formula to be kept in future. We have accordingly decided that whoever passes over the bishop of his church and comes to the judgement (disceptatio ) of the seculars will be expelled from the holy thresholds and kept away from the heavenly altar. Nor, after this decision, which stands 18 The 'third province' probably refers to Lugdunensis Tertia, an administrative region created in the late fourth century: broadly the Loire valley and Brittany (cf. the later province of Tours So may it happen that both those who have previously erred should correct themselves with a fitting emendation, and he who is proven to serve in a clerical office under heavenly observation should know that he is cast out from the clergy if, having passed over the judgement of bishops, he goes to the authority of secular people. We therefore wish each and everyone to recognize that what is constituted in the full order of justice and law shall take the effect of total confirmation in all the affairs of clerics.
But if a cleric accuse a layman, let the cleric first demand to be heard by the bishop; then if he sees the layman is opposed to his demand, let him, with the permission of his bishop, contend in the judgement of the secular moderator.
And the remaining bishops who were present subscribed.
In essence, this text makes three points. First, secular authorityhere meaning a reference to imperial Roman lawstated that bishops could decide legal cases, a rule that was apparently and regrettably being neglected. Secondly, any cleric who took a case to a secular court without permission from his bishop was to be excommunicated and deposed. Finally, a cleric who was in dispute with a layman might go to the secular court if the layman insisted, as long as the bishop allowed it.
This might appear all perfectly straightforward. But on closer inspection, the matter is delightfully complicated, for this text, which we may call Tantam saeculi potestates, has an intriguing history, the relevance of which to the question of the early medieval secular the rest of this article will attempt to unpack.

Tantam saeculi potestates and the Collectio Pithouensis
Into the seventeenth century, Tantam saeculi potestates was considered to be a genuine letter of Pope Leo the Great (c.400-61). But since the edition of the text by the French Jesuit Jacques Sirmond in 1629, it has been generally treated as spurious. 19 That is because Sirmond's edition, unlike previous ones, was based on the earliest witness to the text, the manuscript Paris BnF lat. 1564. This manuscript contains a set of normative ecclesiastical material known as the Collectio Pithouensis. 20 That collection presents our text at folio 20v-21r (Fig. 1): not however as the decree of Pope Leo, but of an entirely different and much less well-known though approximately contemporary Leo, the bishop of Bourges in west-central France, who was active between 453 and 461. 21 The date of the Collectio Pithouensis is disputed. Some historians argue that because its most recent contents date from the sixth century, it must have been compiled around then. Others point out that one cannot date a compilation simply on the basis of its latest elements, since compilers could have deliberately sought to create a historical collection. 22 In any case, the extant Collectio Pithouensis manuscript, copied by the nuns of Chelles, among them a scribe named Altildis, is palaeographically late eighth or early ninth century in date. As such, it is the earliest 19 The text is presented as Pope Leo's ninety-sixth letter in D. Leonis  attestation of the Leo text, and very likely preserves it in its original form, as a synodal decree from Bourges, not Rome. The actual text is for all intents and purposes identical to that found in later manuscripts; the only significant changes are to the address and the subscriptions. Since Sirmond showed that it was not a genuine papal text, Leo's letter has fallen off the radar. But the letter is significant for those concerned with the secular, given how prominent such vocabulary is within what is only a short text: saeculi potestates, examen seculare, disceptatio secularium, secularis potestas, seculi moderator, and in the rubric, secularia iudicia. It bears emphasis that the text's ostensible aim is not to delegitimize or condemn outright 'secular' authority or legal process, but simply to regulate clerics' participation in it. Naturally secularis and similar words do not have exactly the same meaning as the bewilderingly polyvalent modern English word 'secular'. 23 But nor can we simplistically read the secular of this document a priori as wholly distinct from its modern meanings.  The fifth-century context of the decree deserves consideration. It forms part of a set of material from western Gaul produced at this time, characterized by Jean Heuclin as 'un vaste programme réformateur'. 25 Alongside Leo's text, there were acts from the Council of Angers of 453, the Council of Tours from a decade later, and a Council of Vannes around the same time, as well as another jointly written letter, addressed to Bishop Talasius of Angers. 26 Together, these texts give us an insight into the very beginning of the institutionalized church in Gaul, just before Sidonius Apollinaris' letters, and long before Gregory of Tours. Leo of Bourges is in fact the first known bishop of Bourges, just as his co-signatory to our decree, Victorius, is the first known bishop of Le Mans. 27 It is striking how all these mid fifth-century texts concern themselves with distinguishing clerical behaviour from that of the laity. 28 For instance, and perhaps surprisingly for those who associate such matters with the eleventh century, the letter to Bishop Talasius recommends that men who are already married should not be appointed as clerics 'if possible', since they are more likely to have children whilst in office, contrary to canon law: better instead to ordain unmarried men. 29 As the church's structures became increasingly autonomous of the failing institutions of the Roman empire that had previously framed everything, there was a great deal of boundary policing to be done, and this had legal implications that continued to be worked through into the sixth century.  The mid-fifth-century letter of Bishop Leo of Bourges and his colleagues should therefore not be seen as a radical or isolated text, but as an early Gallic manifestation of a broader process, as clerics within institutionalizing churches grappled with the legacy of imperial law and legal process, and their place within an increasingly post-imperial world. Its conceptual origins may lie less in direct Augustinian theological influencethough his work was known in fifth-century Gaul, Augustine did not explore the practical legal implications of his theological elaborationsthan in the aftershock of the Priscillian scandal. 33 Priscillian, a Spanish bishop, was brought before the imperial court on charges of sorcery, and his eventual execution around 385 shocked observers at the time: our main source, Sulpicius Severus, writing in western Gaul around 403 in an ascetic context, pinned the debacle on the unwise decision to involve 'secular judges' (saeculares iudices) in the dispute. 34 The concept of the secular also made its way into Roman imperial law, appearing there for the first time as a demarcation from the clerical or ecclesiastical in an edict issued in the name of Emperor Theodosius II and Caesar Valentinian III in October 425. 35 As a means of shoring up collective episcopal authority, and organizing a distinction within a Christian society, the demarcation had a long future ahead of it.

The Carolingian reception of Tantam saeculi potestates
It is hard to say how the Tantam saeculi potestates text was read and circulated in the fifth century, and what influence it exerted at the time of its composition, because it has been preserved in its original form only in the ninth-century Chelles manuscript. Although the nuns at Chelles were not the only people in Carolingian Francia to be interested in the decree, elsewhere it was copied in the revised form translated above, in which Bishop Leo of Bourges has transmuted into Pope Leo. It was in this papal form that Tantam saeculi potestates was cited by the great Carolingian archbishop of Reims, Hincmar (d. 882).
Hincmar is the first-known author to cite the Leo text, which he did on no fewer than eight occasions. 36 Clearly this was a text that he thought useful and important. What is especially interesting is that he put it to work for two distinct purposes. 37 On the one hand, Hincmar drew on 'Pope Leo' to defend the notion that clerics should not be compelled to attend secular courts. In 868, he quoted Leo in support of his nephew, the bishop of Laon, who had refused to attend the royal court to answer legal charges. 38 When that nephew eventually changed his mind, deciding 34 Sulpicius Severus, Chronica, ed. and trans. G. de Senneville-Grave (Paris, 1999) But Hincmar also used the Leo text to defend the rights of the kings and the role of secular law in judicial procedure. In fact, this was the context of his very first reference to it, in 863, concerning the case of Bishop Rothad of Soissons, who had complained to the pope about Hincmar's attempts to depose him. 42 Here, Hincmar used Leo's text to justify his use of royal proof texts in a set of conciliar acta that is now sadly lost; Hincmar's point was that 'Pope' Leo had validated secular courts, so it was perfectly all right to draw on secular legal traditions. In 871, the Leo text features again in two letters written by Hincmar of Reims, or at least composed with his assistance, in the name of King Charles the Bald, where it performed a similar function: to justify the role of kings in judging bishops, 'according to the divine constitutions'. 43 What made the Leo text helpful for Hincmar was, we may surmise, its balance: on the one hand, its assertion that clerics should be treated differently; on the other, its support of secular law in principle, including a limited application to clerics. This tied in very well with Hincmar's overall position on these matters. Hincmar assumed that all the authentic texts bequeathed from antiquity must fit together in some way, so the challenge was simply to work out by what deft interpretation and occasional light editingfor instance, the omission of awkward clauseswas required to bring out that intrinsic coherence. 44 This coherence was the point Hincmar emphasized with reference to Bishop Rothad's case, shortly before quoting 'Pope' Leo: 45 Let no one be upset that in this account of what happened (series gestorum), we sometimes put the edicts of the laws in front of the sentences of the holy canons, and sometimes put them after the chapters of the canons . . . For in ecclesiastical judgements and cases between ecclesiastical people, the sentences of the laws and of the canons are sought, read out and set forth, so that the legal sentences sought and requested by the leaders of the church and issued by the sentence of the princeps are treated as canons, and the canonical sentences are seen to decide matters no differently from the legal ones, as anyone who reads the canons understands.
Of course, not everyone in Carolingian Francia agreed with Hincmar about the nature of the relationship between royal and ecclesiastical law that he sought to establish in this dense passage, either in practice or in theory. On this, as on so much else, there was no single 'Carolingian' position. 46 We might see Hincmar's efforts as attempts to reconcile the distinction between laity and clerics, which included a judicial aspect, that was being increasingly strongly emphasized in the ninth century by authors such as Florus of Lyon and the compilers of Pseudo-Isidore, with the archbishop's abiding respect for traditions of Roman law. 47 That raises the question of who was responsible for transferring the attribution of the Tantam saeculi potestates text from Leo of Bourges to Pope Leo, to make a useful text more authoritative. Might it have been Archbishop Hincmar himself? Certainly Hincmar attributed the text to Pope Leo and the Roman synod on every occasion. 48 More suggestively, not only was Hincmar the first author to cite the text, but the earliest manuscripts with the papal version of the letter, Paris BnF lat. 12445 (fol. 204) and Berlin SB Phillips 1741 (fol. 34v), are both ninth century, strongly associated with Reims in general and with Hincmar in particular. 49 In fact, the letter was added as an afterthought into the Berlin manuscript, from which the Paris one was copied in around 870 (Fig. 2).
However, we should not jump to conclusions. Although Hincmar has a reputation for devious textual emendation, he is not renowned as a proponent of papal authority, and indeed in his De presbiteris criminosis he claimed that the decree of 'Pope Leo' was really based on the fifth-century Council of Carthage. 50 And while Hincmar was the only Carolingian author to cite the Pope Leo text, he was not the only Carolingian author interested in it. For Tantam saeculi potestates also appears in the notorious and dauntingly complicated ninth-century forgery known as Pseudo-Isidore. This massive collection of legal material appeared in various different versions or classes, most of which pay little attention to secular law. But one of them, known as Class C, provides a bumper collection of Pope Leo's letters; 51 and nestled amongst them we find our Pope Leo text. 52 Because Pseudo-Isidore Class C is preserved only in half a dozen twelfth-century manuscripts, such as Reims BM ms 672 (Fig. 3), it has usually been considered a twelfth-century redaction. But Steffen Patzold has recently suggested that C could actually have been compiled in the ninth century, even if no early manuscript has survived. 53   derived from Hincmar's version might offer some circumstantial evidence to support Patzold's argument. 54 It is therefore conceiveable that Bishop Leo was already cast as pope in the text that Hincmar used, whether this was a manuscript of Pseudo-Isidore Class C or material preparatory to it. When Hincmar started to use the Leo text in 863 (and also had it added to a blank page in the Berlin manuscript), he was still on reasonably good terms with his nephew Hincmar of Laon, who we know to have been close to Pseudo-Isidorian circles, and who may have been connected with Class C in particular. 55 Perhaps the younger Hincmar supplied Pope Leo to his uncle, who was cautious about unfamiliar texts with which he disagreed, but welcomed those that supported his point of view.
Tantam saeculi potestates and papal reform c.1100 It may not be a surprise to learn that the Leo text won new relevance in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, when questions about the boundary between clerical and lay returned to the fore. 56 It features in some eleventh-and twelfth-century canon law manuscripts, such as the Collectio Sinemuriensis (which drew on the C class of Pseudo-Isidore) and the Collectio Atrebatensis (which drew on the Sinemurensis). 57 Steven Schoenig S.J. has discovered that the Leo text also appeared in the collection known as the Collectio Britannicathough it was later erased in the collection's only manuscript, perhaps for purely practical reasonsand that, intriguingly, it seems to have been copied from Hincmar's version of the text. 58 In this respect, the decree's revival forms part of a pattern of rejuvenated interest in comparable late antique texts, such as the letters from the fifthand sixth-century popes Gelasius and Pelagius I on clerical exemption already mentioned above though unlike Leo's, some of these letters had not been cited in the Carolingian period, instead appearing for the first time in the late eleventh century. 59 Its most revealing appearance is however in a treatise by a cleric named Deusdedit. Having started as a monk at Tulle in Aquitaine, Deusdedit became a cardinal at Rome in the 1070s. 60 He is today best known for his Collectio Canonum, a remarkable canon law collection in support of papal primacy, which he completed around 1087 and for which he drew on an unusual range of sources. 61 However, Deusdedit also wrote a fiery Investiture Controversy polemic, the Libellus contra invasores et symoniacos, the second draft of which he finished around 1097. 62 This text has been relatively little studied, though it exercised significant influence at the time. Like his canon law collection, Deusdedit's Libellus drew on an unusual variety of material. 63 Its overt aim was to attack those who wished 'to subject the Church of Christ to royal power', and to show that kings and clerics had distinct duties (aliud quippe sacerdotum, aliud est officium regum -'the duty of priests is one thing, the duty of kings another'). 64 In the course of his third book, on how clerics should be treated, Deusdedit turned to the question 'of those who dare to persecute or judge [priests], setting aside fear and the Judgement of God'. 65 After providing quotations from the Bible on the special role attributed to priests, he argued that these principles applied to priests both sinful and pious, and that sinning priests should be judged only by clerics, before turning to what the 'statutes of the holy fathers' had decreed on this matter. It was in this context, as part of his defence of a judicial separation between laity and clergy, that Cardinal Deusdedit quoted five lines of Leo's text, presented as a papal decree from a Roman synod. 66 Deusdedit's use of the Leo text is particularly telling if we compare it with Hincmar's, for two key differences emerge. First, whereas Hincmar tended to present the text in the context of church councils and Roman law, Deusdedit included the text in a chapter mostly made up of quotations from Pseudo-Isidore, reflecting his clearer focus on papal authority (and perhaps giving a hint as to where Deusdedit came across the text). Secondly, and more importantly, all that Deusdedit excerpted from the Leo text was the declaration that emperors transferred judicial authority to bishops, and that clerics who go to secular courts were to be excommunicated. The final passage that permitted clerics to go to a secular court with episcopal permission was silently omitted. As a consequence, Deusdedit's Pope Leo is rather less nuanced than Hincmar's. Like Hincmar, Deusdedit was aware of the complexity of late antique law. Unlike Hincmar, however, he did not regard this as a coherent system that needed to be properly understood and cherished. Not long after he had quoted the Leo text, Deusdedit explained that since we are aware that in the Justinianic Code and in the books of Novels and in certain other books of secular law (legum saecularium), there are some things that seem to dissent from the decision of the aforementioned fathers and Christian emperors about the judgement of God's ministers, it must be said that secular laws should be followed and embraced insofar as they do not go against a long and continuous war between church and state. Instead, it has tracked the vicissitudes of a particular text which classed certain laws and procedures as 'secular' and others as clerical. What clues does this history have to offer to a study of the secular in the early Middle Ages?
The first is that any such history has to be comfortable with complexity. There was no agreed canon of texts in the early Middle Ages for these kinds of questions, and relevant texts circulated in different forms, or were simply rare and difficult to access. Any attempt at a systematic reconstruction of the early medieval law on this issue would therefore be misconceived. 70 Nevertheless, there was a tradition of drawing a distinction between the 'secular' and the sacerdotal in terms of legal immunity that reached back into late antiquity, and never quite faded away. Like a flare, the history of Tantam saeculi potestates marks moments at which the boundary between clerical and secular was especially significant: the mid-fifth century, as institutionalized Christianity established itself in Gaul in the context of a fading empire; the ninth century as bishops began to work through the implications of a renewed empire; the late eleventh century, when the papacy and its fellow travellers sought to establish papal autonomy in the face of imperial claims. As is apparent from the successive textual manipulations of Leo's letter, this tradition involved editing and adaptation, and was not just a passive or reactive adoption of the legacies of the past. Even so, as Leo's letter also suggests, the process was to some extent cumulative, in that ninth-century arguments oftenthough not alwaysrevolved around late antique texts, while eleventh-century arguments oftenthough not alwaysrelied on the copying, organizing and elaboration of these texts by Carolingian clerics.
Yet despite this continuous tradition, or rather through it, we can also see shifts in how the secular was deployed in arguments about clerical immunity. The content of the Leo text, as opposed to its labelling, did not much change: substantially the same text can be read in twelfth-century manuscripts as in ninth-century ones. But it nevertheless meant different things at these different times. In the fifth century, Tantam saeculi potestates was issued as a measure to boost episcopal authority within a fledgling church. In the ninth century, now sailing under a papal flag, it was used to express the ideal balance between royal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and indeed even to support the liability of clerics to secular law, in the face of alternative views. In the eleventh century, it was employed more selectively to express the supremacy of papal jurisdiction over imperial. The thread that connects these episodes was the effort to create a distinction, and not that distinction's precise meaning or implications, which changed with the wider historical context. Where then does this history of clerical immunity leave the question of the early medieval secular? As recent research has emphasized, the notion of the secular fundamentally implies drawing a boundary to create a bracketed space. In early medieval Europe, that boundary was most often drawn by the churchor more accurately, by particular clericswhereas in the modern world it is usually drawn by the secular stateor rather, by particular politicians. Yet though the polarity of the operation has been reversed, the kind of distinction established in texts such as the various iterations of Tantam saeculi potestates remains recognizable, not least in how it was articulated or emphasized to suit specific political circumstances. It follows that if we wish to write a full history of how this boundary has been established and performed, whether in legal terms or more generally, then the European early Middle Ages must be included, not as a static backdrop but as a dynamic and integral phase within an evolving tradition.