DECRETISTS. - The dissemination of the Decretum Gratiani (v. CORPUS IURIS CANONICI), which quickly entered practical use and was widely employed as a textbook in the universities, gave rise to a flourishing school of scholars and commentators who, carrying out on the Decretum a work analogous to that which the Bolognese glossators had conducted on the Roman laws, enriched canonistic literature with summae and commentaries on Gratian's text. The appellation of decretistae thus came to designate, in a stricter sense, these interpreters, who were for the most part ecclesiastics. On the other hand, this expression is also customarily used to distinguish, in the history of canonical literature, that period of about a century extending from 1140 to 1234, that is, up to the publication of the Decretals of Gregory IX, after which the decretalists (v.) prevailed instead. It should be noted, however, that the two terms, decretists and decretalists, must not be regarded as opposed, because the latter did not cease to gloss the Decretum, nor did they constitute a school different from that of the decretists; moreover, the distinction between decretists and decretalists appears inadmissible for canonists who wrote both on Gratian's Decretum and on the Decretals.
The initiator of the exegesis of the Decretum was Paucapalea, a disciple of Gratian himself, also the author of certain interpolations to his master's text, called, perhaps precisely after his name, paleae. Glossators were furthermore Albert (later Pope Gregory VIII), Rufinus, John of Faenza, Stephen of Tournai, John Semeca the Teuton, author of the ordinary gloss on the Decretum, and its reviser Bartholomew of Brescia. Authors of summae were, besides some of the same glossators, Roland Bandinelli (later Pope Alexander III), Simon of Bisignano, John
Bassianus, Ognibene and, among the most notable, Uguccione of Pisa. Once the period of the decretalists arrived, the Decretum nevertheless continued to be taught in the universities and elaborated by scholars, so that one must also recall the Breviarium Decretorum of the Portuguese John of God and the works of Princivalle and of Guido of Baisio.
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Niccolò Del Re