For the past thirty-five years, John Witte has been writing on the history, theology, and law of marriage. His writings on this topic range from biblical and classical texts to the latest cases before American and European courts, with a special emphasis on the impact of the Protestant Reformation on Western marriage law.1 I was privileged to be part of two major interdisciplinary projects that he codirected with Don Browning and Martin Marty, respectively—one on “Sex, Marriage, and Family and Religions of the Book,” the second on “The Child in Law, Religion, and Society.” As part of that work, John and I coedited a volume, To Have and to Hold: Marrying and its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400–1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2007). With his patient encouragement, I also completed a hefty monograph: How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from Its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
That latter book focuses on how the doctrine of marriage as one of the sacraments of the New Law was constructed by medieval scholastic theologians. In retrospect, we can see the beginnings of the doctrine in anonymous collections of “sentences” compiled during the first quarter of the twelfth century, and it had acquired the de facto status of orthodoxy by the middle of the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, the doctrine was not formally defined as a dogma of the church until the sixteenth century, when the Council of Trent, responding to the Protestant reformers’ rejection of Catholic sacramentalism in general and of the sacramentality of marriage in particular, determined that there were exactly seven named sacraments, no more and no less, and that one of these was matrimony: a sacrament in the fullest sense and in every respect.
The legal argument that I am teasing out in this chapter was a feature of theology, and not of canon law. After the marriage decretals of Pope Alexander III (reigned 1159–81), the results of which the theologians did their best to accommodate, medieval canon law contributed very little to the development of the sacramental doctrine of marriage.
1 Preliminary Observations
Scholastic theology emerged in the cathedral schools of northern Europe during the first quarter of the twelfth century. Among the traits that characterized this earliest scholastic theology were: an effort to systematize and to present essential theological truths in a readily accessible and watertight form; the posing and resolution of apparent inconsistencies in the textual traditions; a pragmatic emphasis, aimed at providing priests with the information that they needed for their ministry; and the harvesting of and reflection on more or less authoritative excerpts (sententiae) gathered chiefly from patristic writings but also from the work of recent and contemporaneous masters. The practice of collecting and reflecting on sententiae supplemented commentary on scripture, which was always the core of scholastic theology. As well as stirring up intellectual inquiry and debate, it paved the way for greater systematization.
Sacramental theology as an organized field of study and an apt topic for treatises emerged quickly in the context of the new scholastic theology, and the theology of marriage as one of the sacraments emerged concurrently with
The discipline of scholastic theology advanced considerably from around 1130 to the 1270s, as regards both its methodology and its knowledge base. The quaestio—a pair of plausible but mutually contradictory propositions in search of resolution—proved to be a much more powerful tool than the sententia. Theologians of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, informed by Aristotle and by Muslim and Jewish philosophy, were increasingly attracted to speculative inquiry, so that theology became the subtlest and most demanding of intellectual disciplines, presupposing many years of study. These developments coincided in northern Europe with the transition from cathedral schools to corporate universities, but few of the new universities during the thirteenth century had faculties of theology. (Paris was the most notable exception.) Scholastic theology during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was largely the province of the mendicant orders, especially the Dominicans and Franciscans: friars dedicated to preaching and confession. The friars practiced in their own houses of study the methods of teaching, study, and inquiry that had evolved in the urban schools.
The development of the sacramental theology of marriage went through three busy and highly productive periods, between which not much happened. The first period begins in the early twelfth century and culminates in Peter Lombard’s Sentences (1158), in four books, which would prove to be the most successful and enduring textbook of theology.6 The Lombard devoted most of the fourth book to the seven sacraments, with a treatise on the sacraments in general and then a treatise on each of the seven in turn. (Prior to Peter Lombard, it seems, no one had been counting!)7 The last of these sacramental treatises, on marriage, is the longest, but the reasons for its length have less to do with theological considerations per se than with the many rules and regulations that marrying entailed.8 The second busy period runs from the late twelfth century until about 1270. During this period, the sacramentality
A major difference between the first and the second of these periods pertains to the tolerance for anomalies and inconsistencies. Twelfth-century theologians took these in stride. Indeed, the earliest extant statement identifying marriage as one of the sacraments (ca. 1125) presents this situation as an anomaly: “Whereas all the sacraments [including marriage] were instituted after sin and because of sin, marriage alone was also instituted before sin occurred, and not as a remedy, like the others, but as a duty.”9 Among the commonplaces of sacramental theology from around 1130 until the end of the twelfth century were (a) that the sacraments of the New Law, by definition, both signified and conferred special sacramental graces, and (b) that the sacrament of marriage, which was one of those sacraments, did not. Thirteenth-century theologians, on the contrary, were troubled by such anomalies and worked to resolve them. By 1250, most theologians agreed that marriage conferred a specific sacramental grace—a thesis that the canonists ignored for centuries. Thus, whereas twelfth-century theologians had regarded marriage as an integral but exceptional instrument within a sevenfold sacramental system, thirteenth-century theologians construed marriage as a species within the univocal genus of the sacraments of the New Law, also known as the sacraments of the church.
Two clarifications are in order before we proceed. First, when medieval writers spoke of the sacrament of matrimony, they were almost always referring to the act of getting married (that is, to the partners’ mutual plighting of troth), and not to the consequent and life-long condition of being married. In this respect, the sacrament of marriage was comparable to that of baptism, which occurred momentarily at the font but established a life-long condition. Second, throughout the period under discussion, theologians as well as canonists assumed that marriage was wholly subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction as regards its validity or invalidity.10 Ecclesiastical authority alone, vested in bishops, councils, and popes, had both legislative and jurisdictional power over marriage: the power to determine the rules pertaining to validity, the diriment impediments, and so forth; and the power to determine through episcopal courts whether a particular marriage was invalid, so that the divorced partners would be free to marry others. The church courts even reserved the right to
2 A Hybrid Sacrament
As one of the seven sacraments of the New Law, marriage deserved to be celebrated in a church ritual, ideally with family members and other representatives of the community in attendance to witness the change of status taking place in their midst. Parish priests were supposed to oversee the process of marrying, and the ceremony of marriage was in itself a teaching opportunity. At the core of the church wedding, aside from the legal formalities, were the nuptial blessing and ritual acts of joining, such as the dextrarum iunctio (the priest’s joining of the spouses’ right hands). The popularity of the dextrarum iunctio in religious art as an image of marrying increased as the doctrine of marriage as one of the seven sacraments of the New Law became more deeply entrenched in the minds of the clergy and pious layfolk.11
Before Tametsi, however, the mutual agreement (consensus) of the spouses in the present tense, provided that there was no impediment of relationship, sufficed to make a valid and indissoluble marriage. No particular form of words was required, although some became customary. The record of witnesses might be necessary if the validity of a marriage became the subject of litigation, but witnessing was evidence that the act had occurred. It was not an integral component of the act itself. Hugh of Saint-Victor (d. 1141), in an early discussion of the perils of clandestinity, noted that the problem would go away if marriages had to be celebrated in church, but he conceded that the consensus of tradition ruled out that option.12 One might speculate about the probable reasons for this resistance, which sharply distinguished Roman from Eastern Christianity, but that would be a topic for another essay.
The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, in canon 51, prohibited clandestine marriages and declared that spouses who married clandestinely must make an
Professional theologians, therefore, had to accommodate the fact that this particular sacrament of the New Law, alone among the seven, could be validly performed without any prescribed verbal formula and even without the ministry of a priest. Theologians held that the nuptial blessing and ritual acts such as the joining of right hands pertained to the sacrament not de necessitate but only de solemnitate, like the priest’s blessing of the water before the rite of baptism, and the mingling of a little water with the wine during the eucharistic rite.14 The idea that the nuptial blessing or ritual joining of the couple was integral to the sacrament was always tempting, and some theologians tried to accommodate it, but it was too much at variance with accepted law and tradition to take root. Theologians might still argue that the absence of the ritual component meant that the sacrament was deficient in some sense—for example, that the sin of clandestinity was an obstacle to the reception of nuptial grace—but they were bound to accept that spouses who married clandestinely, provided that their consensus was authentic and that there was no impediment of relationship, were sacramentally bound together.
The validity of clandestine marriages was one of a cluster of anomalies pertaining to the unusually hybrid nature of the sacrament. The sacraments of baptism and Eucharist provided a model that theologians applied, mutatis mutandis, to the other five, but whereas baptism was only a symbolic washing, and Eucharist only a symbolic meal, sacramental marriage was a real marriage. Again, sacraments typically involved a priest’s uttering of a prescribed sacred formula over some prescribed material stuff: bread and wine, or water, or chrism. The two components could be regarded as verbum (word) and elementum (stuff), respectively, according to an analysis that went back to Augustine, but scholastic theologians, well-versed in Aristotelian philosophy, preferred to think of them as form and matter. The hylomorphic analysis was more flexible
Most important of all, a salient feature of the sacraments, properly so called, was that the persons who received them did precisely that: their role was wholly receptive and passive. This is what was meant by saying that the sacraments performed their saving work ex opere operato—a scholastic phrase that the Council of Trent would include in its dogmatic statements on the sacraments. The agent was a ministering priest, and the recipients received the sacramental grace from a sacrament unerringly unless they put some obstacle in its way, such as an incompatible intention or a mortal sin. But in marriage, the recipients were also the agents of the sacrament. In effect, the spouses themselves were the ministers of this sacrament, although medieval theologians rarely spoke of the spouses as ministers. (The term would have implied that they were priests.)
Two Dominican theologians, Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), recognized to an unprecedented extent that marriage could be adequately explained as to its raison d’être and its rationale in political, merely human terms, prior to its special status as a sacrament. Here, the quotable experts were not Augustine and Gregory the Great but Aristotle and Cicero.
Albert and Thomas parsed marriage in terms of diverse branches of law. For example, Albertus Magnus claimed that marriage had undergone four historically cumulative “institutions,” pertaining respectively to the natural law, to the Mosaic law, to the civil law (as embodied in the Corpus Iuris Civilis), and to the New Law of Jesus Christ.15 And Thomas Aquinas proposed in the Summa contra gentiles that marriage was subject to three regimes: as the means of perpetuating the human species, it is an “office of nature,” subject to the natural law; as the means of perpetuating the political community, it is subject to the civil law; and as the means of perpetuating the ecclesiastical community, it is subject to the governance (regimen) of the church.16 There is no suggestion here, however, that marriage might be subject to multiple jurisdictions. As the superior court, canonical jurisdiction trumped secular jurisdiction over marriage.
3
In his Scriptum (his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard), Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between the contract and the sacrament of marriage. Thomas characterizes the two components as material and spiritual, respectively. Thus, the sacrament of marriage presupposes what Thomas calls a “material contract.” Assuming that every sacrament has analogous material and spiritual aspects, Thomas claims that the contract is related to the sacrament of marriage as ablution with water is related to the sacrament of baptism.17 Every sacrament presupposes some natural or material entity that is raised to the spiritual level of a sacrament. It is because marriage is a contract, according to Thomas, and not because it is a sacrament, that it requires an agreement to be outwardly expressed in words or equivalent signs.18 Thomas did not develop this theory extensively per se, but he used it as the key to explaining why the sacrament of marriage was peculiarly subject to positive legislation, and thus to changes regarding its sine qua non conditions, such as those pertaining to the impediments of age and relationship.19 The purpose of such legislation, in his view, is to enhance the personal, familial, and political benefits of marriage.20 The church’s interests in such legislation are more elevated than those of merely secular political communities, but they are not essentially different. Construed as a contract, marriage is regulated by the commonwealth (the political community), which has the power to alter the preconditions required for valid contracts. Construed as a sacrament, marriage had been instituted once and for all by Jesus Christ, and only the “solemnities” (accidental ritual aspects) of the sacrament could be changed. Henceforth, theologians analyzed marriage in relation to two distinct domains, respectively contractual and sacramental, each illuminated by its own set of texts and theories. The sacrament presupposed the contract.
The contract-sacrament theory would prove to be the key that enabled the Council of Trent to rule that clandestine marriages would henceforth be invalid.21 The Council regarded the writings of the medieval scholastic theologians as authoritative guides to doctrine, especially the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas had fallen silent before reaching the sacrament
4 Clandestine Marriage at the Council of Trent
Before 1563, most theologians held that marriages contracted clandestinely, other things being equal, were valid and insoluble. A few theologians were inclined to regard the nuptial blessing (with the joining of right hands) as a sacramental form, without which the union would be at best a valid contract. This opinion was not without appeal, for it was congruent with how clergy and layfolk imagined marriage as one of the sacraments of the church. Nevertheless, it was too much at variance with established legal and theological tradition to take root.
By the sixteenth century, however, the perennial anxiety about the perils of clandestine marriage had become febrile.24 Churchmen, intellectuals, and orators, troubled by change and uncertainty, dreamed of an orderly political community rooted in marriage and the family, and they extolled the benign rule of the paterfamilias. Marriage, in their view, was fundamental to familial and civic well-being, whereas both clandestine marriages and marriages of minors without parental consent were subversive. Protestants criticized the church of Rome for accepting clandestine marriages as valid, but Catholic churchmen were no less troubled by them. To be sure, the fact that clandestinity made it easier for minors to marry without parental consent was part of the perceived problem. (These two issues, while separable in essence, were
Some writings on clandestine marriages during the half century before Tametsi illustrate how churchmen and theologians were thinking about the problem. The contributions of Johann Gropper (d. 1559) and Domingo de Soto (d. 1560) are especially revealing.25 Gropper had a degree in law, and he was not a professional theologian. That did not prevent him from thinking deeply about theological problems, but his perspective on marriage was that of a concerned pastor and administrator. Domingo de Soto, in contrast, was a Dominican professor of theology with a distinguished chair at the University of Salamanca.
As assistant to Hermann von Wied, the reform-minded archbishop-elector of Cologne, Gropper organized the provincial council of Cologne in 1536. Clandestine marriage was on the agenda. Gropper regarded Cologne’s decisions as merely provisional because he looked forward keenly to the long-awaited general council, which would surely take place soon. One outcome of the provincial council was Gropper’s Enchiridion christianae institutionis: a practical manual of theology written to meet the needs of parochial clergy. It includes a treatise on the seven sacraments, with a section on each of the seven, including marriage. When the decrees of the council were published in 1538, Gropper’s Enchiridion was appended anonymously, and it became conflated with the council’s decisions. The prelates at Trent cited the section on marriage in the Enchiridion frequently during the deliberations of 1563, ascribing it to the provincial council.
Gropper discussed clandestine marriage at length. In his view, the abuse was a result of declining religious and civic standards: to the impiety and vulgarity of his own day. He looked back to a golden age when all marriages had been formally, liturgically, and splendidly celebrated. Gropper argued that a clandestinely contracted marriage was not really a sacrament but only a contract. As such, it was not necessarily insoluble. His reasoning was based on arguments not about the form or the essence of the sacrament, but about the intention of the participants. Spouses who married without the proper intentions befitting a sacrament would not receive the sacrament.26
As to the possibility of making clandestine marriage invalid, De Soto concedes that only a general council or the pope29 can settle this matter definitively, but he argues that a clandestine marriage, however undesirable, must be valid because the agreement (consensus) of the spouses is sufficient. In no other sacrament is the action of the participants more essential and central than it is in marriage, he argues, or the action of an appointed minister more accidental and peripheral. Because the consensus of the recipients constitutes both the matter and the form of this sacrament, as Thomas Aquinas held, the sacrament is complete without the ministry of a priest, which is essential in the other six sacraments. De Soto concludes that marriages contracted clandestinely are valid and sacramental and can even confer nuptial grace.30 Few professional theologians would have disagreed at that time.
At session 7 (March 3, 1547), the Council of Trent had defined the doctrine on the sacraments in general as well as the doctrines on baptism and confirmation in particular. There are exactly seven sacraments of the New Law, according to this definition: baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, orders, and matrimony. No one may add to or subtract from this list. These sacraments were instituted by Jesus Christ, and they are necessary for salvation, for each sacrament contains the grace that it signifies and confers it ex opere operato on recipients who present no obstacle to such grace.31
Some clarifications about Tridentine procedures are in order here. First, the council distinguished systematically between decisions regarding dogma (de dogmatibus), which defined matters of faith, and decisions of discipline, or reform (de reformatione). The former were mostly expressed as condemnations anathematizing those who contradicted the doctrine. Because these canons were considered to be authentic judgments of truth, they were inalterable. Decisions about matters of discipline, on the contrary, were capable of being revoked or amended later. Second, we are remarkably well-informed about the deliberations of the council thanks to Angelo Massarelli, secretary to the council, who diligently recorded the proceedings. These acta were inaccessible until the 1880s,33 but they are available today, together with related records and documents, in superb volumes published under the aegis of the Societas Goerresiana.34
The dogmatic canons and the decrees of reform regarding the sacrament of matrimony underwent four drafts, presented for discussion on July 20, August 7, September 5, and October 13, respectively. The last of these drafts was finally ratified on November 11 at the conclusion to session 24 (the penultimate session of the council).
The dogmatic canons did not present any serious difficulties and were settled quickly, but the decree of reform regarding clandestine marriages required lengthy discussion and brought to light profound and irreconcilable differences among the prelates.35 The plan was to make clandestinity a diriment impediment. The proponents of invalidation outnumbered the opponents in the ratio roughly of five to two. Very few prelates changed sides, and the two camps remained stable throughout the discussion of the four drafts and at the conclusion of session 24. The division did not run entirely along regional or
The opponents’ case included three chief lines of argument. First, the invalidation of clandestine marriages was impossible because no merely human authority had the power to change the essence of a sacrament, which Jesus Christ himself had defined when he instituted the sacrament. Second, invalidation of the persons who could contract marriage was one thing; invalidation of the manner (modus) of marrying was quite another. There was precedent for changing the first aspect through positive law, but there was no precedent for changing the second aspect. Third, it was absurd to include the witnessing of an act within the definition of the act itself.
The proponents found their theological solution in the theory of marriage as a contract-sacrament. Just as baptism presupposed water, so the sacrament of marriage presupposed a material contract, which was regulated by the Christian commonwealth (res publica christiana). Consider what would happen, some proponents argued, if the wine offered on the altar changed into vinegar before the priest consecrated it. In that case, the consecration would not achieve transubstantiation—precisely because the essence defined as necessary for the sacrament remained unchanged. Just so, the proposed reform would invalidate the contract of marriage, preventing the sacrament, but it would “not touch the sacrament” (an oft-repeated phrase) by altering its conditions. No one contested the power of a commonwealth to include witnessing among the conditions for a valid contract.
Hitherto, theologians had used the analysis of marriage as a contract-sacrament to show why the rules determining who was capable of marrying whom could be changed by positive legislation. Now, the same analysis justified the invalidation of marriages contracted clandestinely: a major innovation (with the shift from persons to mode). The conditions for the validity of the contract were regulated by the Christian commonwealth, or res publica christiana, which had the power to change them.
These arguments did not appear in the decree of reform itself (Tametsi). We know about them from the acta, which should be studied in light of contemporaneous treatises prompted by the proceedings.
The initial word of the decree, Tametsi (“Although”), first appears in the second draft of the decree. Its appearance coincides with the excision of a dogmatic canon anathematizing those who held clandestine marriages to be invalid (namely, the Protestants), which had been in the first draft. To make this a matter of dogma obviously made little sense in the circumstances, and the canon was dropped. Thus, although the church has until now regarded clandestine marriages as valid, the decree explains, she has always abhorred
Clandestine marriages would henceforth be invalid, but not by their very nature or according to divine or natural law, as some had argued, but only as a result of new positive legislation. This was a very remarkable decision. The new legislation presupposed that the true church, headed by the bishop of Rome as the vicegerent of Jesus Christ, was not only the mystical body of Christ but also the Christian commonwealth, or res publica christiana. Without “touching” this sacrament, which, like the other six, Jesus Christ had instituted as a prolongation of his earthly ministry, the church as the res publica christiana had changed the conditions necessary for a valid contract of marriage.
See esp. John Witte, Jr., From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012 [1997]); John Witte, Jr. and Robert M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin’s Geneva (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006); and John Witte, Jr., Church, State, and Family: Reconciling Traditional Teachings and Modern Liberties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
The argument is a feature of Philip L. Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from Its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) [hereafter, Reynolds, One of the Sacraments].
This phrase may originally or sometimes have meant “at the entry to a church.”
Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 291–361.
See Luke 20:34–35.
P. W. Rosemann, The Story of a Great Medieval Book: Peter Lombard’s Sentences (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).
On the emergence of the idea of there being exactly seven sacraments, see Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 21–28.
Peter Lombard, Sent. IV, dist. 26–42. Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 422–36.
Cum omnia sacramenta, ed. F. P. Bliemetzrieder, Anselms von Laon systematische Sentenzen, in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters 18.2–3 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1919), 129.
Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 33–51.
Ibid., 89–93.
Hugh of Saint-Victor, De sacramentis christianae fidei II.11.6, PL 176:488–494. Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 398–400.
Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 472–73.
Ibid., 592–99, especially 597 (on Thomas Aquinas).
Albertus Magnus, IV Sent. 26.14, q. 1, resp. For commentary, see Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 699–700. Western theologians and canonists regarded the Justinianic corpus as the most authoritative embodiment of civil law.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles IV, cap. 78. For commentary, see Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 715–17.
Thomas Aquinas, IV Sent. d. 27, q. 1, a. 2, qua 1 [= Suppl. q. 45, a. 1], resp. & ad 1.
IV Sent. d. 27, q. 1, a. 2, qua 1 [= Suppl. q. 45, a. 1], resp.
IV Sent. d. 36, q. un., a. 5, [= Suppl. q. 58, a. 5], resp.
IV Sent. d. 40, q. un., a. 3 [= Suppl. q. 54, a. 3], resp.
André Duval, “Contrat et sacrement de mariage au concile de Trente,” La Maison-Dieu 127 (1976): 34–63; and idem, “Le concile de Trente et la distinction entre le contrat et le sacrement de marriage,” Revues des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 65 (1981): 286–94.
Only a few of the bishops were qualified in theology, but many theologians were present at the Council as advisers to bishops.
Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 907–15.
Ibid., 772–86.
On Johann Gropper’s contribution, see Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 759–72. On Domingo de Soto’s, see ibid., 788–800.
Johann Gropper, Enchiridion christianae institutionis in Concilio prouinciali Coloniensi editum (Paris: Apud haeredes Mauricij à Porta, 1558), De matrimonio (= ff. 174r–192v). Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 759–72.
Domingo de Soto, In quartum librum Sententiarum, 2 vols. (Salamanca, 1566–1579). Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 788–800.
De Soto, IV Sent. 26.2.3. Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 796–98.
The issue of conciliarism (whether supreme human authority over the church was vested in the pope or in a general council) was still unsettled: hence the disjunction.
De Soto, IV Sent. 28.1. Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 798–800.
Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 809–10.
Ibid., 810–17.
See Owen Chadwick, Catholicism and History: The Opening of the Vatican Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 46–71.
Concilium Tridentinum: Diariorum, actorum, epistularum, tractatuum nova collectio (Friburgi Brisgoviae: Herder, 1901–). Volume 9, ed. S. Ehses, published in 1924, contains the proceedings of 1563.
Reynolds, One of the Sacraments, 896–982. I say “prelates” because as well as clerics holding office as bishops, archbishops, or patriarchs, some heads of religious orders and abbots of major monasteries were also included among the voting delegates.