Recent Work On The Making Of Gratian's Decretum Anders Winroth The last twenty-five years have been twenty-five very good years for the study of Gratian and his Concord of Discordant Canons.' Today we know a great deal more about the Decretum than twenty-five years ago, although Gratian himself has become even more enigmatic than ever. Twenty-five years ago, Gratian scholars thought that they knew their man. He was a Camaldolese monk with his home in a known monastery in Bologna. But in 1979, John Noonan published an article demonstrating that this man was a myth built up over the centuries. 2 About Gratian, we can only know with any certainty that he composed the Decretum in Bologna in the 1 130s and the 1 140s, and that he was a teacher with theological knowledge and a lawyer's point of view. Nothing much has been added to Noonan's portrait, except for cautious suggestions that Gratian might have been a monk or a bishop, but real evidence is lacking for either view. 3 Twenty years ago, at the Congress in Cambridge in 1984, Stephan Kuttner gave a magisterial lecture about the accomp- lishments of Gratian research during the previous half-century This paper was given at the Twelfth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Washington, D.C., on August 5, 2004. I have kept the oral format of the lecture. I wish to thank John Dillon, Paul Freedman, Melodie Harris, Ken Pennington, and Robert Somerville for their kind comments on drafts of this article. They do not necessarily agree with my conclusions. 2 John T. Noonan, 'Gratian slept here: The changing identity of the father of the systematic study of canon law', Traditio 35 (1979) 145-172. 3 Anders Winroth, The Making of Gratian's Decretum (Cambridge 2000) 5-8. Enrique De Leon, 'La biografia di Graziano', edd. Enrique De Leon and Nicolis Alvarez de las Asturias, La cultura giuridico-canonica medioevale." Premesse per un dialogo ecumenico (Milan 2003) 89-107.