Canon law is the formal set of rules and laws of the Christian church primarily developed during the European Middle Ages and greatly influencing Western law, jurisprudence, ethics, and political thought. Canon law is developed in the Catholic Church heavily from A.D. 1100 to 1500 and deals primarily with personal morals, church discipline, administration of holy sacraments, and the respective powers of clergy and secular rulers.

Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christian churches, partly because they relied less on ancient Roman legal codes, developed canon law less fully than the Roman Catholic Church.

Canon law began with the codification of religious doctrine and rules at representative church councils, such as the councils at Nicaea (A.D. 325) and Chalcedon (A.D. 451), which also developed major church creeds. Other sources of canon law were decreed from bishops (especially the bishop of Rome, the pope), influential theologians and other church leaders (e.g., St. Dionysius of Alexandria, St. Gregory, and St. Basil of Caesarea). As the Catholic Church became more centralized in authority and organization, these various sources were collected, arranged, clarified, and widely disseminated throughout the Western Christian church in Gratian's Decretum (A.D. 1140). Increased power of the papacy in Rome led to a further collection of canon law in 1234 (The Book of Decretals), which continues down to the present day through papal decrees.

At first, canon law affected only clergy and other religious institutions, but with the increased worldly power of the Catholic Church, it came to dominate much of civil law and government also. Corporate law began as canon law, as corporations originally meant towns, churches, monastic communities, "colleges" (craft guilds, schools, societies), and diocesan organizations rather than businesses. The idea of a corporate body was that the group or community had rights, duties, property, and possessions that did not belong to any individual. Canon law, then, defined the terms of the association, offices and responsibilities of members, distribution of authority, and so on. Most church bodies were ruled by the community, electing leaders and making policy decisions collectively. The modern political idea of common consent actually began in these church communities governed by canon law.

So the greatest influence of canon law on modern secular political thought was the example it gave of a universal, systematic code of principles and procedures--a rational, orderly, legalistic state.

During the Middle Ages, Catholic canon law also prescribed relations between church and state, clergy, and secular rulers. Generally, it held church authority superior to civil government, pope over king, and the rights of clergy to separate courts and legal privileges. As the Roman Catholic Church exercised more detailed rule of civil government and social life (feast days, fasting, religious rituals and habits, commerce, etc.), it caused resistance in the form of anticlericalism and the Protestant Reformation, which strove to limit the church primarily to spiritual matters.

Still, much of modern political theory derived from church canon law. Bodin acknowledged his debt to the canonists' ideas on sovereignty and John Locke's natural rights philosophy is beholden to St. Thomas Aquinas's systematic theology. Debates over the relative power of pope and bishops, councils and local churches occur within canon law development and the modern conception of parliamentary constitutionalism derives from the conciliar movement in the church, which sought to balance the authority of the pope with that of bishops, councils, and corporations.

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