The Canons of the Third Lateran Council of 1179

Alexander III''s 1179 Lateran Council was for medieval contemporaries the first of the great papal councils of the central Middle Ages. Gathered to demonstrate the renewed unity of the Latin Church it brought together hundreds of bishops and other ecclesiastical dignitaries to discuss and debate the laws and problems that faced that church. In this evaluation of the 1179 conciliar decrees Danica Summerlin demonstrates how these decrees often characterised as widespread and effective ecclesiastical legislation emerged from local disputes which were then subjected to a period of sifting and gradual integration into the local and scholarly consciousness in exactly the same way as other contemporary legal texts. Rather than papal mandates that were automatically observed as a result of their inherent papal authority therefore Summerlin reveals how conciliar decrees should be viewed as representative of contemporary discussions between the papacy their representatives and local bishops clerics and scholars.