Born c.1270, Johannes Andreae was the most renowned and successful canonist of the later Middle Ages, referred to by contemporaries as iuris canonici fons et tuba. Johannes studied law in Bologna: Roman law under Martinus Sillimanus and Riccardus Malumbra, canon law under Egidius Fuscarariis and Guido de Baysio. He taught canon law at Bologna from 1301/02 until his death in 1348, save for 1307–9 and 1319, when he was teaching in Padua. He was the author of the Bolognese University statutes of 1317. Johannes Calderinus was his student and later his adoptive son. Paulus de Liazariis and Johannes de Sancto Georgio were also his students, and he counted Cino da Pistoia and Petrarch among his friends. He remained a layman, was married, and had children. His youngest daughter was named Novella, which is probably the reason why he called the final version of his commentaries on the Drecretals and on the Sext, Novella in Decretales and Novella in Sextum.¹ His productivity in canon law was enormous. Most important among his works were extensive commentaries on all of the official decretal collections, which he revised several times. Johannes had a keen interest in the history of his discipline, and often noted the contributions of earlier and even some contemporary jurists in his various writings. He died in Bologna in the plague of 1348.²

¹See Stephan Kuttner, ‘Joannes Andreae and his Novella on the Decretals of Gregory IX’, The Jurist, 24 (1964) 393-408. On the charming story, that Novella lectured in canon law behind a screen when her father was sick, see C. Donahue, ‘Aggadic Stories About Medieval Western Jurists?’, Diné Israel: Studies in Halakhah and Jewish Law, 24 (2007) 215* n. 12. Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

² This paragraph is derived from Kenneth Pennington in Medieval Canonists: A Bio-Bibliographical Listing (http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/1298a-z.htm, last visited, 21 May 2011).

The Ames Foundation has had Harvard Law Library’s copy of Johannes’ commentaries on the Decretals and the Sext digitized from the version published by the well-known Venetian printer Franciscus Franciscius (Francesco De Franceschi). The copy is bound in five physical volumes, the first of which purports to contain the commentary on book 1 of the Decretals, the second book 2, the third book 3, the fourth books 4 and 5, and the fifth the Sext, divided into two parts, the first containing commentaries on all the titles except for the last, and the second containing a commentary on the last title, De regulis iuris. (This second item is sometimes called Mercuriales probably reflecting its origins in a series of Quaestiones that Johannes treated in special lectures given on Wednesdays.)

We say ‘purports’, because at some stage in its career, our copy was misbound. The last signature in the first physical volume is, in fact, the last signature of book 3 of the Decretals. At the corresponding place in the third physical volume, we find the final signatures of book 1. The mistake was an easy one to make. The first folio of signature Hh of both books has the same folio number and the finis of book 3 lacks a register. We rather suspect that the binder knew when s/he got to physical volume 3 that the mistake had been made, but at this point the first physical volume was bound, and the remaining signatures of book 1 had to go somewhere. Fortunately, it seems to be all there, just in the wrong place.

All of title pages tell us that the Commentaria were printed ab exemplariis per Petrum Vendramaenum in Pontificio Venetiarum foro advocatorum mendis, quibus reserta erant, diligenter expurgatis. (I’m not sure that this quite parses; we would expect quae not quibus.) We have learned to be careful about claims by sixteenth-century printers that they corrected errors, but Pietro Vendramin’s name appears on a number of works in this period, particularly those on cases of conscience, frequently in conjuction with that of the printer, De Franceschi. It is possible that Vendramin did a modest amount of editing.

The work opens with a dedicatory epistle of De Franceschi to one Marcolino Monsignano, a papal officer. A document granting Monsignano citizenship rights in Montalto delle Marche in 1587 has recently come on the market.

The copy that has been digitized is made publicly available online through this page. Hyperlinks in the following table of contents will bring you directly to the page in question on the Harvard University Library’s Page Delivery Service. What follows is a complete set of metadata down to the title level of all of physical volume 1 and all of book 1, wherever it is located. We did not compare the titles in the edition systematically with those in the modern editions, but where we noticed discrepancies, we included matter that is in the modern editions and not in the 1581 edition in square brackets, and matter that is in the 1581 edition and not in the modern editions in diamond bracketes. The metadata for books 2–5 of the Decretals and for the Sext is more sketchy, but we intend to fill it in, once more down to the title level, relatively soon. Ultimately, we hope to take it down to the level of the indvidual decretal, but that is a large undertaking and will take some time. The apparatus of glosses that Johannes wrote on the Clementines is not included here, but is included in future plans for digitization. In the meantime, it can be found in the UCLA digitization of the Roman edition of 1582 of the Corpus Iuris Canonici.

We let the computer do the foliation. By and large computers do a better job at foliation than do sixteenth-century printers. (The day that they foliated physical volume 3 seems to have been a particularly bad day at Francesco’s shop.) We did, however, note where the text is misfoliated, so that someone who wants to use the original foliation may do so. The indices in volume 5 are not foliated. We put in the signature marks, and will do them completely in the Page Delivery Service.