Stephan Kuttners's last Discovery on Walter of Coutances: A Commemoration 110 Years after Kuttner's Birthday

Abstract

Stephan Kuttner (†1996) established the Institute of Medieval Canon Law at The Catholic University of America in 1955. He moved it to Yale University in 1964 and then to the University of California, Berkeley in 1969. It then was moved to Munich for almost twenty years and renamed the Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval Canon Law. In 2016 the Institute was transferred to Yale University under the direction of Anders Winroth. Kuttner was also the founder of this journal in 1971. Ludwig Schmugge has aptly dubbed him the ‘Pope’ of canon law studies during the twentieth century. He was very active in his scholarly research until the final years of his life. His last publication was probably an essay on the Stroma of the canonist Rolandus of Bologna published in 1990. Working on a revised edition of his collection of articles with the title Gratian and the Schools of Law 1140-1234 I used Kuttner’s personal copy of this book with many additions of the author that he made in the margins after 1983. Studying these notes I found a typed text among his ‘Retractationes’ for p. 321 of his essay ‘Anglo-Norman Canonists of the Twelfth Century’ referring to bishop Walter of Lincoln. This text runs like this. Walter bishop of Lincoln: This was Walter of Coutances (de Constantiis), archdeacon of Oxford 1175-82, bishop of Lincoln 1183, archbishop of Rouen from 1184 or 1185, who died in 1207. He addressed to the bishop of Exeter ‘super negociis iuris librum unum’, see John Bale ‘Index Britanniae scriptorum’, ed. R. L. Poole (Oxford 1902) 103. [A second edition, by Poole and M. Bateson, was published in Cambridge 1990.] I shall give a fuller bibliography and discuss the possibility of other writings by Walther of Coutances in an article planned for a Festschrift to appear in 1994.