BROCARDI GIURIDICI. - It is held by some that the expression brocardia derives from a corruption of the word burcardus, a term by which the Decretum of Burchard of Worms, otherwise called Collectanea canonum or Liber decretorum, would have been designated by transference.
The purpose of the juridical literary genre of the b. was to condense into maxims the general principles of law and at the same time to offer the occasion and the material for a logical elaboration of law.
The general principles that were originally drawn, as arguments, from individual texts and that were noted (argumentum, nota, notabilia) in the margin of these, were subsequently extracted and furnished with supporting texts and brought back together with the contrary general principles, these too presented with the accompaniment of the texts in their support. Regularly, logical links were established (often by means of distinctiones) between the opposing principles, and from them the grounds for reconciliation were deduced (solutiones contrariorum). In this way a logical system of general principles was arrived at, which constituted the basis of the juridical dialectic of the time. A typical elaborated example of this complex genre of juridical literature in the civil-law field is offered at the end of the 12th century by the glossator Pillius of Medicina under the title Libello disputatorio. He likewise calls Brocarda the entire collection of quaestiones, and quaestio the individual part of it. But he uses the term brocarda there not in the technical sense of a literary genre of generalia, but in the broader sense of the discussion pro and contra, of which he gives the following clarifying description: «Brocardica materia dicitur quae est contrariorum opinionum rationibus involuta».
Similar to that of Pillius and somewhat later is the collection owed to the glossator Otto, provided with the solutions by Azo, and which commonly goes under the latter's name with the title Brocardica domini Azonis.
As for the canonistic field, understanding the genre of the brocarda in the sense fixed by Pillius, it would appear appropriate to consider the Concordia discordantium canonum itself, written by Gratian (v.) in the middle of the 12th century, as the extended realization of the genre of the b., where the dicta Gratiani would constitute the solutiones of the contraria.
On the other hand, what is contained in the Opusculum de distinctionibus in canonum interpretatione adhibendis ad usum magistrorum, advocatorum et iudicum, compiled by Petrus Blesensis in France around 1180, would not be matter of true b. (contrary to the opinion of Van Hove); since this work does not completely resolve the genre of the brocardia in the above-mentioned sense. Kuttner excludes that true canonical b. can be spoken of for the age of the decretists. The first collections of canonical b. would have to be attributed to the decretalists. Of two of them the text has come down to us. A first is represented by the Generalia of Richardus de Lacy (Anglicus), elaborated on the compilatio Iᵃ, around 1198. There follow the Brocardia of Damasus, written between 1210 and 1215 on the first three compilationes of the decretals and reworked by Bartolomaeus Brixiensis in 1234, with additions of new citations of texts, the number of the 127 rules fixed by Damasus remaining unchanged. The same work was subsequently reworked after the Gregorian decretals.
Bibliography2 works
Antonio Rota