Chapter 4 - The Library of Iberian Resources Online

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proceed as he thought fit, and in mid-October 1243, in the presence of Raymond of Peñafort, the sacrist was clothed a Dominican by Pedro de Albalat and, with the assembled chapter, quasi flentes, chanting 'talem volumus vos habere, talem volumus vos habere', was confirmed as bishop of Barcelona. (91) Pedro de Centelles was the first Dominican bishop south of the Pyrenees and is, therefore, something of a landmark. The date to [71] note, however, is not October 1243. It is October 1241. For Archbishop Pedro had not allowed the papal vacancy to delay the reform of his province, and through him Dominican influence had been making itself felt at Barcelona during those two years. As at Pamplona in 1239, he seized the opportunity of holding a sede vacante synod at Barcelona during his visit to investigate the election process in the autumn of 1241. The synod -- of 18 October 1241 -- witnessed the publication of two didactic tracts which together comprise Pedro de Albalat's contribution to the history of the thirteenth-century Spanish Church, and, individually, reflect the influence upon him of Raymond of Peñafort. The first is well enough known. It described the procedure for dealing with heretics and is regarded as 'le premier document digne du nom de manuel de procédure inquisitoriale'. (92) It was a business-like guide, the sort of A.B.C. that Guillermo de Mongrí had asked for when faced with the problem of apparent repentance on a large scale six years earlier; and scholars have not hesitated in ascribing authorship to St Raymond rather than to Pedro, the archbishop who promulgated it. (93) Its form and content suggest that they are correct. No such attention, however, has been given to the second tract published on the same occasion as part of the synodal constitutions, and which loomed at least as large as le manuel de l'inquisiteur in the Tarragona province during the 1240s and 1250s: Pedro de Albalat's Summa Septem Sacramentorum. The Summa (94) was promulgated by Pedro both at Barcelona and in his own archdiocese at a synod of uncertain date. (95) In the form in which it was reissued, almost verbatim, by Pedro's brother Bishop Andrés of Valencia in October 1258, it was published by Aguirre in [72] the eighteenth century. (96) The text used by Andrés was that of the Barcelona synod of October 1241, to which he adhered fairly closely. (97) Yet it cannot be asserted that the Barcelona version was the editio princeps of the Summa, for Andrés refers also to the 'tract's' having been issued by his brother at a Lérida synod, and it is not clear from the context whether Pedro was bishop of Lérida or archbishop of Tarragona at the time of the said synod. Moreover, the confusion has been further confounded by Aguirre who miscopied his Valencia MS. (98) So this Lérida synod must have occurred either during Pedro's episcopate, October 1236 to February 1238, or sede vacante after the death of Pedro's successor there, Raimundo de Ciscar, in 1247 or 1248. Now it is true that Pedro was accustomed to intervening in the affairs of the sees of his province during episcopal vacancies, as at Pamplona and Barcelona, and that he had a direct hand in the appointment of Raimundo de Ciscar's successor at Lérida. (99) Nevertheless, on balance, the later date would seem to be less likely than the other as the occasion of the synod mentioned by Andrés de Albalat -- who in September 1248 was himself at Lérida, as a member of the Dominican community. (100) For by 1247-8 the diocese of Lérida had already received, from the late Bishop Raimundo, a sacramental treatise which compares favourably with Pedro's Summa. (101) It compares favourably, and there many points of comparison since both Raimundo's statutes and the Summa owe the greater part of their material to that common source of so much synodal [73] legislation of Western Europe at this period: the statutes attributed to Eudes de Sully, bishop of Paris (1196-1208). (102) Of the two, Raimundo's statutes appear to have followed the Paris statutes rather more closely than does the Summa, and to have introduced considerably less that was original. (103) But what is of greater interest here is that there are some grounds for arguing that Raimundo also had access to a version of the Summa which had been issued at the Lérida synod to which Andrés de
Albalat referred in 1258. For a while Raimundo's statutes and the Summa have in common a number of phrases which the Paris statutes lack, (104) the former do not contain the distinctive passages on the sacraments and patronage of the friars which appear in the 1241 Summa. (105) The Lérida statutes bear no date, but assuming that they were issued before 1241 -- an assumption for which there is some support (106) -- it may be suggested that they were based on an earlier version of the Summa promulgated by Pedro while he was bishop of Lérida -- which we may identify as Summa I -- and, further, that this version had incorporated Eudes de Sully's statutes without adding very much fresh material. Within this hypothesis the final section of the Lérida statutes -- for almost all of which no parallel passages may be found either in the Paris statutes or in the Summa -- would be regarded as comprising Bishop Raimundo's [74] own original contribution. (107) But this is only a hypothesis. The terrain is notoriously difficult to negotiate; delusions are legion; a single manuscript as yet undiscovered might easily upset it entirely; and -- most substantially -- no manuscript of Summa I has been produced. Leaving aside the putative Summa I we are on firmer ground with the Summa promulgated at Barcelona in October 1241, the earliest known example in the Spanish peninsula of the liber sinodalis which contemporaries regarded as the hallmark of an outstandingly zealous prelate. (108) In October 1261 the clergy of the diocese of Valencia were ordered to furnish themselves with copies of the Summa by the following Christmas, (109) and though neither the Barcelona nor the Tarragona version contains explicit proof that it had any such didactic purpose in those places, it may nonetheless be assumed that 'las escelentes constituciones sobre sacramentos, vida clerical, etc.' which Villanueva noticed at Barcelona but did not bother to analyse, were promulgated as such by Pedro himself. (110) The Summa is not a strikingly original work. It is far from being a landmark in the literature of pastoral theology. Like the Lérida statutes, it leans heavily on Eudes de Sully, and such texts of the Fourth Lateran Council as are accorded mention are remembered not in the terminology of 1215 but in that of 1229 as they had been transmitted by John of Abbeville at the Lérida Council. (111) Yet though the content of the Summa was only very occasionally Pedro's own, positive credit may be given him for the pattern which he imposed on material not his own. It is the arrangement of the Summa that distinguishes it from its main source. Whereas the Lérida statutes had followed the Paris statutes indiscriminately and had departed from that model only in their pell-mell rearrangement of the jumble of miscellaneous communia praecepta, (112) the Summa conflates the old material, [75] introduces some that is new, stresses that which Pedro deemed in need of being stressed, and contrives a brief and orderly handbook containing a section on each of the seven sacraments -- in a different sequence from that previously adopted -- introduced by instructions De ordinatione sinodi, which depart hardly at all from Eudes de Sully; and followed by two further sections -- Qualiter Christiani orare debent, based on nos 10 and 32 of the communia praecepta, and De vita et honestate clericorum, which also makes use of the communia praecepta as well as of additional fresh material. Even when the Paris statutes are most closely followed Pedro adapts them to his own requirements and sub-edits freely. Such is the case in the sections on Baptism, Confirmation and Extreme Unction. In the first, the lapidary sentences are shuffled; further details about godparents are supplied; it is explained that baptism by the child's parents is permitted (which neither the Paris nor the Lérida statutes had mentioned although the practice was tolerated elsewhere at an earlier date) ; (113) and provision for the baptism of an infant delivered by caesarean section -- with which both the other sets of statutes had dealt (114) -- is omitted. Further on, the special efficacy of Confirmation is stressed, (115) and the point is made that neither that sacrament nor Baptism was to be repeated, even if the Christian had meanwhile embraced the Jewish or Moorish faith -- a problem of immediate concern for the parish clergy of Southern Aragon though not for those of Northern France. Likewise Pedro addresses himself to the sacrament of Extreme Unction
Page 1 and 2: THE LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ON
Page 3 and 4: about him for which no certain answ
Page 5 and 6: in the novella plantatio, (53) ther
Page 7: 1208 King Pedro II praised their 'a
Page 11 and 12: ail for him when he had been unable
Page 13 and 14: monastery of San Cugat del Vallés:
Page 15 and 16: 45. Ibid. 86. Cf. Lér. c. 24-6 for
Page 17 and 18: 86. Raimundo died at Lyons in 1247,
Page 19 and 20: 118. Summa, Fo. 129rb. 119. Fos. 12
Page 21: 150. Forma de sancta sinodo celebra

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