The Collectio canonum quadripartita (also known as the Collectio Vaticana or, more commonly, the Quadripartita) is an early medieval canon law collection, written around the year 850 in the ecclesiastical province of Reims. It consists of four books (hence its modern name 'quadripartita', or 'four-parted'). The Quadripartita is an episcopal manual of canon and penitential law. It was a popular source for knowledge of penitential and canon law in France, England and Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries, notably influencing Regino's enormously important Libri duo de synodalibus causis ('Two books concerning diocesan affairs'). Even well into the thirteenth century the Quadripartita was being copied by scribes and quoted by canonists who were compiling their own collections of canon law.
This work should not be confused with the early twelfth-century Latin translation of Old English law known as the Quadripartitus.
Background
The complementary acts of confession and penance, originally highly ritualized acts undertaken only once in a lifetime and in public fora, developed in the early Middle Ages into a disciplinary system known as private (or 'secret') penance, in which the faithful were encouraged to confess their sins regularly and in secret to a priest or confessor, who then enjoined an appropriate period of punishment. Through the Middle Ages the private penitential system became an increasingly elaborate and ritualized institution. In its earliest form, however―that is, as it was practiced from around the sixth to eighth centuries―this system was dependent upon the transmission of basic lists of sins (often sexual in nature, though also dietary, criminal and profane) and their corresponding punishments. These short lists of sins made up a genre of texts known as the 'penitential handbook' (or just 'penitential'). Penitentials were first employed as disciplinary tools by Irish and British monks living in cloistered, highly ascetical religious communities, but soon spread to England and France, where they developed into varied and grander forms. By the eighth century, penitentials had adopted a focus on lay sins; they were now commonly used by secular priests in their task of hearing confession from lay parishioners, and by bishops as tools for moral instruction. Their popularity was rivalled only by their variety; as the number of manuals in circulation grew, so did the discrepancies between them. This gave rise during the early ninth century to a backlash against the diversity of penitentials and the diversity of disciplinary and theological 'errors' which they propagated. A number of Frankish councils demanded that the laws of the older penitentials be brought into line with the accepted canonical norms of the church, as reflected in the more conservative collectiones canonum (canon law collections) being compiled at the time. Partly as a result of such efforts towards standardization, the older penitentials eventually fell out of use and were replaced by the large collections of penitential and canon law which dominated in France and Italy in the tenth and eleventh centuries.