DECRETALISTS. - This term is customarily used to designate the canonists who concerned themselves with the abundant legislative material issued by the pontiffs of the 12th and 13th centuries, to whose Decretals the value of a general norm had been given both in practice and in theory. Decretalists were therefore both the compilers of all the collections that were gradually being made of these sources of canon law, and the interpreters of those same collections. What had been done for the Decretum (v. DECRETISTS) was also done for all the collections of Decretals, which were glossed and abundantly commented upon.
Among those who made this or that collection of Decretals the object of teaching and study, mention should be made of Bernard Balbi of Pavia and Richard Anglicus, who glossed the first of the Quinque compilationes antiquae (v. COMPILATIONES [QUINQUE] ANTIQUAE); Albert of Benevento, who glossed the second; Vincent the Spaniard, who glossed the third; James of Albenga, who glossed the fifth; and also the Englishman Alan, Magister Damasus, Gratia Aretino and Tancred, author of an apparatus on the first three compilations, regarded, until the publication of Gregory IX, as the ordinary gloss of the Decretals.
But the true historical period characterized by the activity of the decretalists is the one that begins with 1234, the year in which the promulgation of the Decretals of Gregory IX (v. CORPUS IURIS CANONICI) gave rise to the formation of a flourishing school of decretalists, which saw to adorning them with glosses and commentaries carried out with a more rational and perfected method. Among the decretalists of this second period the names remain famous of Sinibaldo Fieschi (later Pope Innocent IV), to whom is owed the celebrated Apparatus on the five books of the Decretals; Henry of Susa, better known as Cardinal Hostiensis; the Frenchman Peter of Sampson; Cardinal Godfrey of Trani; Bernard of Compostella iunior, author of the Margarita Compostellana, a compendium of the Apparatus of Sinibaldo dei Fieschi; and Bernard Bottoni of Parma, author of a Summa Decretalium, regarded as the ordinary gloss of the Decretals. Nor were there lacking in this period authors of particular treatises on special subjects (de matrimonio, de electione, etc.), such as, for example, Raymond of Peñafort, William Durandus, Giles Fuscarius, who was the first lay teacher of canon law, and other lesser figures.
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Niccolò Del Re