GUIDO DA BAISIO

GUIDO da BAISIO. - Canonist, born of a Bolognese family at Baisio (Reggio Emilia) c. 1246-56, d. in Avignon on August 10 (June 5?) 1313. He studied law at the school of Guido da Suzaria and Giovanni

d'Anguissola. He was chaplain to the bishop of Parma Gerardo, who was later cardinal and bishop of Sabina; later he is found in Bologna, where in 1296 he was appointed archdeacon of the cathedral Chapter by Boniface VIII.
In Bologna, and perhaps earlier also in Reggio, he taught canon law with great renown, first as an independent lecturer (until 1301) and then with an official appointment (1301-1304), having Giovanni d'Andrea as a disciple. The period of his Bolognese teaching coincided with the exercise of his archidiaconal office, for which he was and still is known and cited as the "archdeacon" par excellence. In 1304 he was called to Avignon, where Benedict XI wanted him as chaplain of the papal court and writer of the so-called litterae contradictae.

Among his principal works stands out a voluminous apparatus to the Decretum, entitled Rosarium Decreti (Strasbourg 1472 and numerous subsequent edd.), composed between 1296 and 1302 with the aim of updating and completing, with his own and others' contributions, especially with extracts from Uguccione, the ordinary gloss to the Decretum itself: which in fact is found enriched, in subsequent editions, with many additiones drawn from the Rosarium. G. da B. ranked among the principal commentators of the Liber sextus with his Apparatus seu Glossa seu Commentarius ad Sextum (Milan 1480), which he completed between 1306 and 1311: a much vaster, but less precise, work than that of Giovanni d'Andrea, which later became the ordinary gloss. He also wrote a Tractatus de haeresibus et aliis criminibus ad Clementem V, composed on the occasion of the well-known trial of the Templars accused of heresy, a work still in manuscript, of which Mansi reports the two main sections (Mansi, XXVI, 415-26; ibid., Supplemento, 357-86).