Foone🏳️‍⚧️ @foone@digipres.club
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so I'm reading about early middle ages catholic law and the author of the book (in 1987) points out that the problem with all these various ad-hoc writings about what penance you should for for X sin or Y crime was that there was just too much writing to be able to access it all quickly when needed.

source: Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (James A. Brundage

Screenshot of a book: Sexual Behavior and the Early Medieval Canonical Collections By the early tenth century the Western Church's accumulated body of behav- ioral and doctrinal regulations had grown unmanageably large. The thousands of canons adopted by synods and councils, together with the decrees and rul- ings of popes and bishops, the declarations of patristic writers and other spiri- tual authorities, and a considerable body of royal and imperial law dealing with religious and moral matters, all comprised what was vaguely thought of as canon law. The very bulk of these sources meant that a priest, bishop, or judge who sought an authoritative answer to nearly any problem arising in church administration or in ecclesiastical disputes faced a formidable task. A conscien- tious prelate who sought guidance in dealing with nearly any common prob- lem-such as, for example, marital incest, adultery, rape, prostitution, prop- erty rights of concubines, or grounds for divorce-needed a large library. He had to resign himself (or more likely his clerks) to hours of tedious searching in order to unearth the relevant conciliar enactments, papal decrees, or patristic dicta. Information retrieval, to call it by its twentieth-century name, posed major and often insoluble problems for pastors, Church administrators, and ec- clesiastical courts.
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