The Great Canonists

The thirteenth century in Italy was a time of extraordinary creativ­ity. If we also consider the jurists who read and interpreted canon law, the panorama becomes crowded with great figures.

The canonists’ exegetic activities were fully as intense and their re­sults just as polished as those of the civilians. The canonists concen­trated on the great legal collections of the church, the Decretum_y the Liber Extra_y and, in the fourteenth century, the Liber Sextus and the Clementinae_y but they also worked on such texts as ZheQuinque compi­lationes antiquae. Just as Accursius had selected and crowded into the Glossa ordinaria a complete apparatus of glosses to supplement all the laws ofjustinian, so a number of canonists composed thick apparatus on the laws of the church.

Summae on Gratian’s Decretum began to appear around the mid­twelfth century. There were summae by Rolandus, Rufinus, John of Faenza (all twelfth-century jurists) and by Stephen of Tournai and Huguccio, who lived into the early thirteenth century.

Aside from the summae, networks oiglossae formed around the laws of the church, in particular around the texts officially promulgated by the popes. These glosses were similar to those of the civilians, but in canon law the phenomenon seemed to have arrived later—in part for reasons we have already seen, such as the nature of Gratian’s Decretum as a private work. They became more the rule after the church’s pro­mulgation of its own first official body of laws in 1209-10 with the Compilatio of Innocent III (the third of the so-called Quinque compi­lationes antiquae).

The term “summa” and the methodology for exposition connected with it remained in the canonistic tradition, and weighty summae were composed in the thirteenth century on the Liber Extra (Decre­tales) of Gregory IX. The most important of these were the summae of Goffredo of Trani (Goffredus de Trano, d.

One jurist from German lands, Johannes Teutonicus (d. 1245) brought togetherglossae to the Decretum, added his own comments, and wrote a comprehensive apparatus (ca. 1217). Another jurist, Bar­tolomeo of Brescia (Bartolomeus Brixiensis, d. ca. 1258), lightly re­vised Johannes Teutonicus’s apparatus. This work became aglossa or­dinaria to the Decretum.

Intense exegetical activity also centered on the Liber Extra. An Emilian jurist, Bernardo Bottoni of Parma (Bernardus Parmensis, d. 1266) was the author of an apparatus of glosses that was accepted as the^Zof Catania but active in a number of cities of northern Italy, Siena in particular, Niccolo dei Tedeschi played a prominent role in the famous Council of Basel (1431—48), where he worked to define his own position on the various theses proposed and debated at the council for limiting the absolute powers of the papacy.^[181] He has passed into history as “Abbas Panormitanus” or simply “Panor­mitanus” because he spent the last years of his life as abbot of Maniace (near Bronte, on the northwest slopes of Mount Etna, in the province of Catania) and as cardinal archbishop of Palermo.

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