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').

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.

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 ninth century, chapters from penitential manuals had entered many of the influential canon law collections then being copied and compiled on the Continent.

Since at least the fifth and sixth centuries, canon law collections could boast of being repositories of the ancient and authoritative conciliar and papal judgements of the Christian church.

Problems of textual stability and genre were further exacerbated by the fact that no one code or collection of canon law claimed status as the recognized standard.

[1] The table above shows how the Quadripartita often circulated in incomplete form, no doubt as a result of the kinds of textual trauma and experimentation which anonymous collections typically experienced at the hands of medieval canonists.

This complex textual transmission, as well as the collection's wide distribution throughout France, Germany, Italy and England between the ninth and twelfth centuries, are indicative of the versatility of the Quadripartita and its popularity as a manual of penitential and canon law in the early Middle Ages.

Beyond what can be gleaned directly from the surviving manuscript evidence, however, it is now known that the Quadripartita influenced significantly at least nine, and perhaps as many as ten, canon law collections composed between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, particularly in northeast France and the region around Trier.