One can have some sympathy with library cataloguers trying to identify a man with this name. Italian edit16 dates him to the 16th century and says that he was born in Contursi [prov. Salerno] but of a family that came from Rome. We do not know where the Contursi attribution comes from, but ‘16th century’ is clearly wrong. The De pensione ecclesiastica was, so far as we can tell, first published in Roma in 1539, a part of the effort of Michele Tramezzino of Venezia, supported by the pope, to publish technical works about the operations of the papal bureaucracy. See Gómez. The first dedicatory epistle of that work by one Antonius Masa Galersius, who apparently either owned the manuscript or an otherwise unknown earlier edition, says that the author was ‘patria Romanus, iuris utriusque doctor, haud vulgaris, in apostolicam Poenitentiariam translatus . . . sub Xisto IV’. Sixtus IV was pope from 1479 to 1484. The dedicatory epistle by the author follows, in which he identifies himself as ‘papae Sixti IV secretarius [et] domini papae poenitentiarius’, and in which he identifies his teacher as one Ioannes Franciscus of Pavia (probably Johannes Franciscus de Pavinis, d. 1484, who taught at Padova but was at this time an auditor of the Rota [MEMJ]).

Source: CERL Thesaurus.

Entry by: CD 22.v.2019

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