On Thu, 17 Jul 1997, Thomas Izbicki wrote: [...]
> Inertia might be a factor, or an effort to reaffirm the constitutions as
> a whole while adding new chapters. How were the revized constitutions of
> an order distributed? I know that the Dominican masters general wrote
> encyclycal letters, but was there a recompilation issued by an order to
> the entire membership via the individual houses?
Recompilations were comparatively infrequent, no doubt because of the
large amount of work involved. Revision and reaffirmation were effected by
the addition of new directives, which naturally produced a tangle of old
and new legislation, which would eventually require the labour of
harmonisation and recompilation and the expense of distributing the new
code.
Michele Mulcahey, who has worked extensively on Dominican education,
outlined the well-planned and efficient Dominican system for copying and
circulation of official texts in a paper at Leeds in '96. I'm not sure if
she has published anything on this subject yet, or if other orders were as
well-organised.
You're no doubt right that local legislation (provinces, observant
congregations, etc.) may have had relatively more importance than the
more general, slower-moving, larger codes, since the former were more
responsive to actual needs or problems.
--
Paul Chandler || Yarra Theological Union
[log in to unmask] || Melbourne College of Divinity
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