Decretum (Decretorum libri viginti)
· Burchard of Worms
· c. 1008-1023
· canon law
Latin · domain: latin-carolingian-theology-canon · researched 2026-11-14
partial / older only. An English translation exists but is partial or older than the critical edition. The gap is a modern, complete translation from the original. A rendering of a daughter version does not count here: it is recorded on the dossier of the text it actually translates.
Why this is in the register
McNeill and Gamer translate only 'Selections from the Corrector and Physician of Burchard of Worms', pp. 321-345 of their 1938 anthology, i.e. portions of Book XIX, the penitential Corrector; their contents list, read in the archive.org OCR, shows no other part of the Decretum. HOLLIS 'Burchard of Worms decretum English translation' returns nothing, and 'Burchard Worms canon law' returns twenty-eight records that are Latin editions (the 1548 Cologne Decretorum libri XX) and German or French studies (Hoffmann 1991; Corbet 2001; Kynast 2020), with Greta Austin's Shaping Church Law around the Year 1000 (2009) an English study rather than a translation. The Latin is printed in Migne, Patrologia Latina 140.
Burchard's Decretum is the law book that carried the Gregorian reform into the eleventh-century parish and the main conduit by which Carolingian and penitential material reached Gratian. English readers can consult its Corrector in excerpt, but the collection's twenty books, and therefore its method of selecting and reconciling authorities, remain closed, which is why the pre-Gregorian canon law that Gratian inherited is so poorly understood in English scholarship.
Austin, Greta. "Shaping church law around the year 1000 : the Decretum of Burchard of Worms." Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, c2009. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/990118371110203941