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IV. Innocent III: A Lawyer-Pope and His Consensual “Policy” of Marriage? A Reconsideration

Abstract This article intervenes in the previous scholarly conversations of Kenneth Pennington, Charles Donahue, Jr., and Anne J. Duggan and suggests through the reassessment of the surviving evidence, a revisionist interpretation. It argues that Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) was not only a pope with legal expertise reflected in the remarkable consistency of his numerous decisions concerning cases of marriage formation that came to his attention in an ad hoc manner, but also, that he was, and he believed himself to be a legislating pope through his plenitude of power. He, rather than Alexander III (1159–1181), was responsible for creating and implementing the consensual “policy”, in the strictest definition of the term, for the formation of Christian marriage. Through a careful investigation of the pertinent papal letters of Innocent III found primarily in his registers, this article reconfirms and demonstrates Stephan Kuttner’s impression of the consistency of the letters as internal proof of the pope’s legal skill that he suggested long ago in 1974.