DECRETALISTI. — This term is customarily used to designate the canonists who dealt with the abundant legislative material issued by the pontiffs of the 12th and 13th centuries, whose Decretals had been accorded the force of a general norm both in practice and in theory. D. thus included both the compilers of all the collections that were gradually being made from these sources of canon law and the interpreters of those same collections. What had been done for the Decree (v. DECRETISTI) was also done for all the collections of Decretals, which were glossed and extensively commented upon.
Among those who made one or another collection of Decretals an object of teaching and study, mention should be made of Bernardo Balbi of Pavia and Riccardo Anglico, who glossed the first of the Quinque compilationes antiquae (v. COMPILATIONES [QUINQUE] ANTIQUAE). Alberto of Benevento, who glossed the second; Vincenzo Ispano, who glossed the third; Giacomo d’Albenga, who glossed the fifth; and also the Englishman Alano, Magister Damasus, Gratia Aretino, and Tancredi, author of an apparatus on the first three compilations, regarded, until the publication of Gregory IX’s work, as the ordinary gloss on the Decretals.
But the true historical period characterized by the activity of the d. is the one that began in 1234, the year in which the promulgation of Gregory IX’s Decretals (v. CORPUS IURIS CANONICI) gave rise to the formation of a flourishing school of d., which proceeded to adorn them with glosses and commentaries composed according to a more rational and refined method. Among the d. of this second period, the names of Sinibaldo Fieschi (later Pope Innocent IV), to whom the celebrated Apparatus on the five books of the Decretals is owed; Enrico di Susa, better known as the cardinal of Ostia; the Frenchman Pietro di Sampson; Cardinal Goffredo di Trani; Bernardo da Compostella inuior, author of the Margarita Compostellana, a compendium of the Apparatus of Sinibaldo dei Fieschi; and Bernardo Bottoni da Parma, author of a Summa Decretalium, regarded as the ordinary gloss on the Decretals, remain famous. Nor were authors of treatises on particular subjects (de matrimonio, de electione, etc.) lacking in this period, such as, for example, Raimondo di Peñafort, Guglielmo Durante, Egidio Fuscario, who was the first lay teacher of canon law, and other lesser figures.