Canones

the social life of early medieval canonical collections

Month: May 2026

Opening of the Sortes Sanctorum on fol. 157v (fragment) of St John's College MS 17. © The President and Fellows of St John's College, Oxford

Publication Bruno: ‘These Lots Never Deceive’

19 May 2026 /

Building on the research done for his ReMA thesis, SOLEMNE’s Bruno Schalekamp just published his study of the so-called Sortes Sanctorum, a prognostic and divinatory text known as “lots of the saints”. It circulated widely in numerous medieval Latin manuscripts dating from the early ninth to the fifteenth centuries, as a companion to many different texts: from schoolbooks, to biblical glossaries, and from encyclopedias to treatises on computus (and canon law, sometimes!). Bruno argues that this work appealed to a broader and more engaged readership than previously recognised. Using newly identified manuscript evidence from the ninth to twelfth centuries, he demonstrates that the text could adapt to different intellectual settings of the early and high Middle Ages,  transitioning from marginalia to an integral component of main texts. In this expansive Open Access article, Bruno pays close attention to the placement of the text in codices and to the text’s transmission history, revealing the sociocultural significance of prognostic texts such as the Sortes Sanctorum within the context of medieval knowledge systems.

Bruno Schalekamp, ‘“These Lots Never Deceive”: Compiling and Reading the Latin Manuscripts of the Sortes sanctorum’,  Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies  11.1 (2026), pp. 36-101. (https://doi.org/10.1353/mns.2026.a990232)

Publication Gideon: ‘Law is Said in Many Ways’

12 May 2026 /

Cover of Peritia journalGideon de Jong (team member of both SOLEMNE and Anchoring Innovation) has just published an article, tackling one of the most vexing questions of historical research into canon law: is canon law ‘law’? Harnessing his legal knowledge and historical skills, Gideon studies the Irish  is generally called canon law and which itself (in some manuscripts) includes a theoretical reflection on the definition of law. Scholars have questioned the extent to which early medieval canon law, and specifically this collection, conforms to law in a meaningful sense. Inspired by H. L. A. Hart’s concept of law, seminal in contemporary legal theory, Gideon’s article argues that laws can be understood only from a participant perspective or ‘internal point of view’. The way the words , and are used throughout the collection points to the presence of this perspective. The article thus makes the case for treating the as canon law.

Thanks to funding from Anchoring Innovation, the article in Peritia is fully Open Access and can be found here.

Gideon de Jong, ‘”Law is Said in Many Ways”: An Attempt at Conceptual Clarification of Canon Law in the Collectio canonum Hibernensis’, Peritia 36 (2025), 71-97. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.PERIT.5.153301

Radboud University Nijmegen
European Research Council

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