Over the last century, various Hilfsmittel have been developed to aid scholars in establishing the contents of manuscripts and collections of medieval canon law. As they stand, these aids provide valuable assistance, but they all too often imprison scholars within existing narratives: that all roads lead to the Concordia of Gratian of ca. 1140, and that all later canon law was built upon this work.
Our project sets out to revise and expand a key database of medieval canon law (the Clavis canonum), with the support of an international group of scholars, to challenge this view. Canonical materials from the early Middle Ages to 1234 will be added, and a more accessible interface created. Not only will the resulting database be available online for general scholarly use via the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the act of editing it also provides an opportunity to nuance and reframe one of the fundamental narratives of medieval canon law.