Anders Winroth (Forst Family Professor of History, Yale) will present to the YISAP workshop on the topic of “How a Ninth-Century Bishop Became a Forger and Gave Us Human Rights” on Friday, November 11th at noon
How a Ninth-Century Bishop Became a Forger and Gave Us Human Rights
The Middle Ages are not generally known for any particular devotion to human rights. In this talk, I wish to complicate that image by highlighting how some of the intellectual seeds of modern human rights were planted in perhaps unexpected contexts. The tumultuous and violent political history of the 830s, and in particular the unhappy fate of several leading churchmen inspired one of the most massive legal falsifications of the premodern period, the so-called Pseudo-Isidorian forgeries. The mysterious forger, who almost certainly was a bishop, forged a system of procedural law that, if it had been scrupulously observed, would have rescued him and his colleagues from deposition and imprisonment. At the time, Pseudo-Isidore were unable to impose his ideas on suspicious contemporaries, but over time, his legal system gained acceptance. When the future bishop Gratian three hundred years later, in the 1130s, needed to summarize procedural law for his handbook of ecclesiastical law, he drew his materials from Pseudo-Isidore. Gratian’s Decretum became foundational for the development of modern procedural law, for instance in its insistence on the rights of the accused and on fair trials. Gratian provided a corrective to the harsher and stricter rules of Roman procedural law, which at about the same time became highly influential.
This interdisciplinary workshop serves as a meeting ground for those who work on the ancient world at Yale, and is an important forum that allows sustained conversation about a common theme.
The workshop meets once a month during the academic year, and is supplemented by the core graduate seminar in the Yale Initiative for the Study of Antiquity and the Premodern World. Presenters include Yale faculty and graduate students, as well as occasional visiting professors. The chronological scope of the seminar extends over the first millennium BCE and up through the premodern period; issues of reception are also considered. The theme for 2016-17 is “Fakes and Forgeries”.