Robert Eugene Somerville (born 1940) was, until his retirement, the Ada Byron Bampton Tremaine Professor of Religion and Professor of History at Columbia University, New York. [1] Since July 1, 2020, he has been the Tremaine Professor Emeritus of Religion. [2]
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1940, Somerville taught at Columbia from 1969 until his retirement, except for a year at the University of Pennsylvania (1976–1977).
Somerville did his doctoral work under Stephan Kuttner at Yale University. He has published widely on the high medieval history of the papacy and of canon law. He is internationally recognized as an authority on medieval church councils. With the publication of his 2011 book Pope Urban II's Council of Piacenza , he has published completely all the sources relating to the councils of Pope Urban II.
Somerville is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and of the Commission internationale de diplomatique. He is a corresponding member of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich and of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He has received numerous awards, including two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowships, in 1974 and 1987. [3]
In 2012, the Catholic University of America Press published a Festschrift in his honor, Canon Law, Religion, and Politics: "Liber Amicorum" Robert Somerville, edited by his former students Uta-Renate Blumenthal , Anders Winroth, and Peter Landau. [4]
He currently lives on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, New York. His son, Gregory Somerville, graduated in 2013 from Columbia College with a Bachelor of Arts in music. [5]
This pamphlet commemorates Columbia's award of the Nicholas Murray Butler Award in Gold.
Canon law is a set of ordinances and regulations made by ecclesiastical authority for the government of a Christian organization or church and its members. It is the internal ecclesiastical law, or operational policy, governing the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches, and the individual national churches within the Anglican Communion. The way that such church law is legislated, interpreted and at times adjudicated varies widely among these four bodies of churches. In all three traditions, a canon was originally a rule adopted by a church council; these canons formed the foundation of canon law.
Christendom historically refers to the Christian states, Christian empires, Christian-majority countries and the countries in which Christianity dominates, prevails, or that it is culturally or historically intertwined with.
Pope Alexander III, born Roland, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 7 September 1159 until his death in 1181.
Pope Urban II, otherwise known as Odo of Châtillon or Otho de Lagery, was the head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 12 March 1088 to his death. He is best known for convening the Council of Clermont which ignited the series of Christian conquests known as the Crusades.
Pope Sergius I was the bishop of Rome from 15 December 687 to his death, and is revered as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. He was elected at a time when two rivals, Paschal and Theodore, were locked in dispute about which of them should become pope. His papacy was dominated by his response to the Quinisext Council, the canons of which he steadfastly refused to accept. Thereupon Emperor Justinian II ordered Sergius' arrest, but the Roman people and the Italian militia of the exarch of Ravenna refused to allow the exarch to bring Sergius to Constantinople.
Philip I, called the Amorous, was King of the Franks from 1060 to 1108. His reign, like that of most of the early Capetians, was extraordinarily long for the time. The monarchy began a modest recovery from the low it reached in the reign of his father and he added to the royal demesne the Vexin and Bourges.
Renaissance humanism was a revival in the study of Classical antiquity, at first in Italy and then spreading across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. During the period, the term humanist referred to teachers and students of the humanities, known as the studia humanitatis, which included the study of Latin and Ancient Greek literatures, grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. It was not until the 19th century that this began to be called humanism instead of the original humanities, and later by the retronym Renaissance humanism to distinguish it from later humanist developments. During the Renaissance period most humanists were Christians, so their concern was to "purify and renew Christianity", not to do away with it. Their vision was to return ad fontes to the simplicity of the Gospels and rediscovery of the New Testament, bypassing the complexities of medieval Christian theology.
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2019. It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a prominent role in the history and development of Western civilization. The church consists of 24 sui iuris churches, including the Latin Church and 23 Eastern Catholic Churches, which comprise almost 3,500 dioceses and eparchies located around the world. The pope, who is the bishop of Rome, is the chief pastor of the church. The bishopric of Rome, known as the Holy See, is the central governing authority of the church. The administrative body of the Holy See, the Roman Curia, has its principal offices in Vatican City, a small enclave of the Italian city of Rome, of which the pope is head of state.
Gerard was Archbishop of York between 1100 and 1108 and Lord Chancellor of England from 1085 until 1092. A Norman, he was a member of the cathedral clergy at Rouen before becoming a royal clerk under King William I of England and subsequently his son King William II Rufus. Gerard was appointed Lord Chancellor by William I, and he continued in that office under Rufus, who rewarded him with the Bishopric of Hereford in 1096. Gerard may have been with the king's hunting party when William II was killed, as he is known to have witnessed the first charter issued by the new king, Henry I of England, within days of William's death.
The Council of Piacenza was a mixed synod of ecclesiastics and laymen of the Roman Catholic Church, which took place from March 1 to March 7, 1095, at Piacenza.
The Decretum Gratiani, also known as the Concordia discordantium canonum or Concordantia discordantium canonum or simply as the Decretum, is a collection of canon law compiled and written in the 12th century as a legal textbook by the jurist known as Gratian. It forms the first part of the collection of six legal texts, which together became known as the Corpus Juris Canonici. It was used as the main source of law by canonists of the Roman Catholic Church until the Decretals, promulgated by Pope Gregory IX in 1234, obtained legal force, after which it was the cornerstone of the Corpus Juris Canonici, in force until 1917.
Papal supremacy is the doctrine of the Catholic Church that the Pope, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, the visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful, and as pastor of the entire Catholic Church, has full, supreme, and universal power over the whole church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered: that, in brief, "the Pope enjoys, by divine institution, supreme, full, immediate, and universal power in the care of souls."
Gerard la Pucelle was a peripatetic Anglo-French scholar of canon law, clerk, and Bishop of Coventry.
Paul Oskar Kristeller was an important scholar of Renaissance humanism. He was awarded the Haskins Medal in 1992. He was last active as Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York, where he mentored both Irving Louis Horowitz and A. James Gregor.
Stephan George Kuttner, an expert in Canon Law, was recognized as a leader in the discovery, interpretation and analysis of important texts and manuscripts that are key to understanding the evolution of legal systems from Roman law to modern constitutional law.
Domenico Capranica was an Italian theologian, canonist, statesman, and Cardinal.
Hilary was a medieval bishop of Chichester in England. English by birth, he studied canon law and worked in Rome as a papal clerk. During his time there, he became acquainted with a number of ecclesiastics, including the future Pope Adrian IV, and the writer John of Salisbury. In England, he served as a clerk for Henry of Blois, who was the bishop of Winchester and brother of King Stephen of England. After Hilary's unsuccessful nomination to become Archbishop of York, Pope Eugene III compensated him by promoting him to the bishopric of Chichester in 1147.
The Italian Catholic Diocese of Piacenza-Bobbio has existed since 1989. In northern Italy, it is a suffragan of the Archdiocese of Modena-Nonantola. The historic Diocese of Piacenza was combined with the territory of the diocese of Bobbio-San Colombano, which was briefly united with the archdiocese of Genoa.
The Journal of the History of Ideas is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering intellectual history, conceptual history, and the history of ideas, including the histories of philosophy, literature and the arts, natural and social sciences, religion, and political thought.
Christopher Robert Cheney was a medieval historian, noted for his work on the medieval English church and the relations of the papacy with England, particularly in the age of Pope Innocent III.