Niccolò de’ Tudeschi (Nicolaus de Tudeschis in Latin), 1386–1445, has been called “the last great canonist in the medieval tradition.”¹ Like many of the medieval jurists, he was known in his own time by various sobriquets: ‘Abbas Siculus’ from his origins in Catania in Sicily and from the fact that he was abbot of Santa Maria de Maniaco in Messina (1425–1434), ‘Abbas modernus’ to distinguish him from Bernardus de Montemirato (‘Abbas antiquus’, c. 1225–1296) and perhaps also with a hint of irony, because it is unclear that Niccolò ever functioned as an abbot, and, finally, ‘Abbas Panormitanus’ or simply ‘Panormitanus’ from the fact that he was archbishop of Palermo from 1434 until his death of the plague in 1445.

¹ Kenneth Pennington in Medieval Canonists: A Bio-Bibliographical Listing (http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/1298a-z.htm, last visited, 21 May 2011).

Panormitanus entered the Benedictine order at a young age. He was sent north to study and is found lecturing in canon law at Bologna, Parma (1411–1418), Siena (1418 – c. 1430), Bologna, again (1430–1432), and probably at Florence. His chief claim to fame is a massive commentary on the Decretals of Gregory IX (the first and by far the longest part of the second part of the Corpus Iuris Canonici). He seems to have done a large part of the work while he was at Siena, but he also seems to have continually revised it.

It is that work, in the Venice edition of 1570–1571, that the Ames Foundation has had digitized from a copy in the possession of the Houghton Library. The four printed volumes also contain Panormitanus’s Consilia, which number over 200; six of the seven Quaestiones that are attributed to him; a work called Practica, which seems to be the Ordo iudiciarius that is sometimes ascribed to him, and a short commentary on the Clementine consitutions (the third part of the second part of the Corpus Iuris Canonici). These works are accompanied by repertoria and marginal commentary dating from the later fifteen and sixteenth centuries.

Panormitanus was active at the council of Basel, first on the papal side and then on the conciliar side. He did not depart with the papal party when the council broke into two in 1437. When his patron King Alfonso V of Aragon was reconciled with the pope in 1443, Panormitanus returned to Palermo, but died shortly thereafter. Whether his political thought would have followed that of Enea Silvio Piccolomini (later, Pope Pius II) back to the papal side, we cannot tell. His earlier works, which are featured here, seem to support papal monarchy.² The work produced here also shows that Panormitanus’s contributions extended in to all areas of canon law. We might particularly note the extensive commentary on Book 2 of the Decretals, the part that concerns procedure.

² For a recent account of Panormitanus’s life and works, on which the above is based, see Kenneth Pennington in Niccolò Tedeschi (Abbas Panormitanus) e i suoi commentaria in decretales, ed. Orazio Condorelli (Roma: Il Cigno Galileo Galilei, 2000) 9–36, also available at http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/Canon%20Law/PANORMITANUS.html, last visited, 21 May 2011.

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.

The copy that we have photographed has some unusual features. In addition to containing the Practica, which have identified above as the Ordo iudiciarius sometimes ascribed to Panormitanus, it also contains two versions of X 1.7 through X 1.9. It is generally accepted that none of the commentary on X 1.7 through X 1.28 is by Panormintanus. Printers lacking such a commentary substituted that of Antonio de Butrio. Our two commentaries are not the same, but which is by Antonio and which is by another is a question that requires more work.

Houghton’s cataloguing may be found at HOLLIS no. 007169251 and HOLLIS no. 007169262. What appears below is more fulsome and gives a better sense of what is contained in the work.

The Foundation hopes in the near future to extend this ‘metadata’ to include the capitula commented upon in each section and a list of the consilia and quaestiones. There is a fold at the top of images 397 and 398 of volume 3 that makes a few words illegible. We hope to remedy that deficiency on these pages shortly.