Canon Law

Examples of Canon Law in the following topics:

• Intellectual Life

  • Both secular law and canon law, or ecclesiastical law, were studied in the High Middle Ages.
  • Secular law, or Roman law, was advanced greatly by the discovery of the Corpus Juris Civilis in the 11th century, and by 1100 Roman law was being taught at Bologna.
  • Canon law was also studied, and around 1140 a monk named Gratian (12th century), a teacher at Bologna, wrote what became the standard text of canon law—the Decretum.

• The Justinian Code

  • There existed three codices of imperial laws and other individual laws, many of which conflicted or were out of date.
  • The Corpus forms the basis of Latin jurisprudence (including ecclesiastical Canon Law) and, for historians, provides a valuable insight into the concerns and activities of the later Roman Empire.
  • As a collection it gathers together the many sources in which the laws and the other rules were expressed or published: proper laws, senatorial consults, imperial decrees, case law, and jurists' opinions and interpretations.
  • This revived Roman law, in turn, became the foundation of law in all civil law jurisdictions.
  • The provisions of the Corpus Juris Civilis also influenced the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church: it was said that ecclesia vivit lege romana — the church lives by Roman law.

• The Ecclesia

  • In Catholic canon law, a particular church is an ecclesial community headed by a bishop or an equivalent figure.

• The Western Schism

  • The suggestion to have a church council resolve the schism was first made in 1378, but was not initially adopted because canon law required that a pope call a council.
  • Eventually, theologians like Pierre d'Ailly and Jean Gerson, as well as canon lawyers like Francesco Zabarella, adopted arguments that equity permitted the Church to act for its own welfare in defiance of the letter of the law.

• Justinian and Theodora

  • Prior to his reign, Roman laws had differed from region to region, and many contradicted one another.
  • Justinian set up a commission of lawyers to put together a single code, listing each law by subject so that it could be easily referenced.
  • This not only served as the basis for law in the Byzantine Empire, but it was the main influence on the Catholic Church's development of canon law and went on to become the basis of law in many European countries.
  • Justinian's law code continues to have a major influence on public international law to this day.
  • She had laws passed that prohibited forced prostitution and closed brothels.

• The Anglican Church

  • Many factors contributed to the process: the decline of feudalism and the rise of nationalism, the rise of the common law, the invention of the printing press and increased circulation of the Bible, the transmission of new knowledge and ideas among scholars, the upper and middle classes and readers in general.
  • According to Canon Law the Pope cannot annul a marriage on the basis of a canonical impediment previously dispensed.
  • The medieval heresy laws were restored and 283 Protestants were burnt at the stake for heresy.

• Astronomy

  • It contains the first two of his eponymous three laws of planetary motion (in 1619, the third law was published).
  • Isaac Newton developed further ties between physics and astronomy through his law of universal gravitation.
  • Newton's Principia (1687) formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, which dominated scientists' view of the physical universe for the next three centuries.
  • This work also demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies could be described by the same principles.His laws of motion were to be the solid foundation of mechanics; his law of universal gravitation combined terrestrial and celestial mechanics into one great system that seemed to be able to describe the whole world in mathematical formulae.
  • Copernicus was a polyglot and polymath who obtained a doctorate in canon law and also practiced as a physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist.

• Some Useful Terms

  • Canon - In a canon, different voices (or instruments) sing (or play) the same melody, with no changes, but at different times.
  • The melody is usually sung at the same pitch or an octave higher or lower, but there are also canons in which the second part sings or plays the melody a perfect fourth or fifth higher or lower than the first part.
  • Round - In a canon, obviously every section of the canon must "fit" with the section that comes after it.
  • A round is a special type of canon in which the last section also fits with the first section, so that the canon can be repeated over and over without stopping.
  • The different voices enter at different times on the same melodic theme (called the subject), so that the beginning may sound like a canon.

• Resonance

  • The application of resonance to this case requires a weighted averaging of these canonical structures.
  • These are the canonical forms to be considered, and all must have the same number of paired and unpaired electrons.
  • The following factors are important in evaluating the contribution each of these canonical structures makes to the actual molecule.
  • The stability of a resonance hybrid is always greater than the stability of any canonical contributor.
  • In each case the most stable canonical form is on the left.

• The Hundred Years' War

  • Edward enacted numerous laws strengthening the powers of his government, and he summoned the first officially sanctioned Parliaments of England.
  • Joan of Arc is considered a heroine of France for her role during the Lancastrian phase of the Hundred Years' War, and was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint.
  • Joan of Arc was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920.