Henricus de Segusio, nicknamed ‘Hostiensis’, is perhaps the best-known of the second generation of decretalists, those who commented on the Liber extra, the Decretals of Gregory IX, which were promulgated in 1234. Hostiensis combined his accomplishments as a jurist with an equally successful ecclesiastical career, and, unlike most of the canonists who are known for their writings, did relatively little teaching. Born around 1200 in Susa in Savoy, a small town in the mountains near the modern French border, he studied law at Bologna in the 1220s, at about the same time when Sinibaldo dei Fieschi, the future pope Innocent IV (1241–54), began his training as a lawyer there. It remains uncertain whether Hostiensis ever taught in Italy. By 1239, he was apparently archdeacon of Paris and may have taught on the Gregorian decretals, whereas other sources relate his long stay in England (1236?–44) as a member of the household of Queen Eleanor. Simultaneously, his relationship to the the papacy grew very close, and Hostiensis soon served as Pope Innocent's chaplain. He received the bishopric of Sisteron in 1243–1244, and later became archbishop of Embrun (1250–61). The pope repeatedly employed him in diplomatic missions. His efforts were finally rewarded with the cardinalate, which Pope Urban IV bestowed upon him in 1262 in the form of the bishopric of Ostia, whence comes his nickname ‘Hostiensis’. He participated in the protracted conclave at Viterbo (1268–70), but illness forced him to leave before the final election took place. When he died in the Dominican convent at Lyon (1271), he had just completed the second version of his Lectura, i.e., Commentaria, on the Decretals of Gregory IX. Among his earlier works, the Summa on the Decretals of Gregory IX, completed c.1253, and called from the dawn of printing the Summa aurea, was even more celebrated.¹

¹ Derived from Kenneth Pennington, Medieval Canonists: A Bio-Bibliographical Listing (http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/1140a-z.htm, last visited, 16 July 2013). The Ames Foundation is in the process of producing an updated version of this work.

Digital copies of the Summa aurea are available on a number of websites. Both the Cologne edition of 1612 and the Venice edtion of 1570 may be found on Google Books, and pdf of the edition of Venice 1574 may be downloaded from the Medieval Canon Law Virtual Library. So far as we are aware, there are no digital editions of the printed editions of the Lectura available, although a fourteenth-century manuscript of the work has been published online by the Bavarian State Library. It is that work, in the Venice edition of 1581, that the Ames Foundation has had digitized from a copy in the possession of the Harvard Law School Library. Like all of the printed editions and most of the manuscripts, this is an edition of the final recension of the work. Hostiensis did not live to polish that edition, and it has recently been shown that in some cases he did not delete what he had first written, but added to it, sometimes contradicting himself. It is, however, a fascinating work, representing his most mature thought, while the Summa aurea was completed almost twenty years previously, and does not seem to have been revised after that.

The copy that has been digitized is made publicly available online through this page. Hyperlinks in the following table of contents, which will appear on this page shortly, will bring you directly to the page in question.

The reader may be surprised to discover that Hostiensis commented on the Liber sextus, which did not appear until 27 years after his death. He did, however, comment on the Novellae of Innocent IV, many of which appeared in the Liber sextus. The modern printers, and, indeed, the later makers of manuscripts, updated his citations to correspond to the texts as they were currently available. Whether our edition includes additional commentary not by Hostiensis is a question that still needs to be explored.

The library cataloguing may be found at HOLLIS no. 004188892. What will appear below will be more fulsome and give a better sense of what is contained in the work. Right now, it gives a guide to each physical volume, the parts of those volumes that contain more than one title page, and the first and last title in each part.

The Foundation hopes in the near future to extend this ‘metadata’ to include the capitula commented upon in each section.