Gripla - 2019, Blaðsíða 158

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tory of the adoption of an important canon at a local level. Icelandic clerics
adopted and adapted a fairly narrow range of standard texts and commen-
taries in their treatment of Si quis suadente, but the surviving manuscripts
sources show that the canon and its consequences continued to be points
of discussion and pastoral administration for Icelandic churchmen long
after they were first promulgated and translated into Old Norse-Icelandic.
Lists of actions that led to automatic excommunication were common in
fourteenth-century legal manuscripts, and many episcopal statutes warn
about such excommunications and discuss how people thus excommuni-
cated should be dealt with.
The Canon
Si quis suadente (C. 17 q. 4 c. 29) is an oft-discussed canon that first saw
wide circulation in the second recension of Gratian’s Decretum (ca. 1150).9
The basic premise of Si quis suadente was that clerics should be absolutely
protected from violence. The canon enforced this with automatic excom-
munication (“ipso facto”) for anyone who violated it. Moreover, this
particular type of excommunication, in the original wording of the canon,
could only be absolved by the pope except in cases of urgent mortal peril.
This canon was the origin of a new type of excommunication in the me-
dieval church, excommunication latae sententiae, or by an already passed
sentence. This type of excommunication did not require a formal warning
or even that a bishop speak the sentence over a person. Performing a for-
bidden action was enough to automatically bring down the sentence; hence
such excommunications are sometimes referred to as excommunications
de jure or ipso facto. 10 In Old Norse-Icelandic this is translated as bann af
Medieval Legal History: Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue, edited by Sara McDougall,
Anna di Robiland and John Witte Jr. (Berkeley, Calif.: Robbins Collection, 2016), 301–
309; Winroth, “The Canon Law of Emergency Baptism,” 203–229; and Anders Winroth,
“Goffredus och Västgötalagen,” Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift 1:119 (2019): 183–88.
9 The full text of the canon reads: “Si quis suadente diabolo huius sacrilegii uicium incurrerit,
quod in clericum vel monachum uiolentas manus iniecerit, anathematis uinculo subiaceat,
et nullus episcoporum illum presumat absoluere, nisi mortis urgente periculo, donec apost-
olico conspectui presentetur, et eius mandatum suscipiat.” Decretum magistri Gratiani, C. 17
q. 4 c. 29, 1.822
10 Vodola, Excommunication, 34–35 note 27.