Summae

The summa was a work of a quite different sort. Even though it too was linked to the school, it was not as fortuitous and fluid as the fragmentary written documentation of the school lessons.

Before the appearance of the summa, its way was prepared by trea­tises, some of which dealt with a specific subject (one example is a tractatus of Martinus Gosia on dowries),^{[123] [124] and others of which were more like exceptionally full glosses. In general, however, the summa matured soon after the mid-twelfth century. One of the first hesitant attempts was Rogerius5S interweaving of a Summa Codicis with the Summa Trecensis? the genre later became clearer with the Summa Codicis and the Summa Institutionum of Placentinus and, above all, with Azo’s weighty and thorough Summa Codicis.}

Thus, with the summae, theoretical elaboration of the law and the circulation of ideas were condensed in works that could be defined in literary terms, that were written in a homogeneous manner, and that reflected an original thinking process the development and expression of which were controlled by the author.

The great legal collections of the church also came to have impor­tant works of interpretation, but these were only in part comparable to the works of the civilians. In the twelfth century, the text that for decades had served as a base for annotations explicating and supple­menting its thought was Gratian’s Decretum—the work of an individ­ual, thus less constraining and less inflexible than the Iibri legales. Al­though glosses and supplementary networks to the Decretum did exist, it inspired summae almost immediately. These summae differed from their civil-law counterparts, however, in that they did not follow a preordained logical structure. They were more similar to the civil­ians’ apparatus in that they included minute notations in the form of glosses arranged to follow one after the other rather than being ab­sorbed into a continuous, flowing prose. Some canon-law summae that stand out for their techniques of composition and their form are those of Rolandus, Rufinus, and John of Faenza (Johannes Faventi- nus), all twelfth-century jurists, and Stephen of Tournai (Stephanus Tornacensis) and Huguccio, who lived into the early thirteenth century.

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