Silvia Di Paolo

Verso la modernità giuridica della Chiesa. Giovanni Francesco Pavini (ca. 1424–1485): la stampa, le decisiones, le extravagantes e la disciplina amministrativa (199 pp.)
ISBN 978-3-944097-09-1
ISBN-A 10.978.3944097/091

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Recommended citation:
Silvia Di Paolo, Verso la modernità giuridica della Chiesa. Giovanni Francesco Pavini (ca. 1424–1485): la stampa, le decisiones, le extravagantes e la disciplina amministrativa, Roma 2018 (Online-Schriften des DHI Rom. Neue Reihe | Pubblicazioni online del DHI Roma. Nuova Serie, Bd. 2), URL: http://www.dhi-roma.it/dipaolo-pavini.html

Abstract:
At the height of Italian Humanism, the life of the Paduan canonist Giovanni Francesco Pavini represents an exemplary parable of how, at the threshold of the modern age, the traditional figure of the theologian and doctor in utroque iure was enriched with new profiles, expressions of a greatly renewed juridical culture motivated by Humanism and by the effects of the birth of printed law. His versatility in legislation, case law, legal theory and administration of the Church was the result of spending half his life in Padua, where he was immersed in an academic environment and in diocesan administration, and the other half in Rome, where he was part of the elite board of the Sacred Rota and where he showed an early tendency to acknowledge the need for change in a medieval world in crisis. The importance of the introduction of print in the diffusion of legal culture seemed immediately revolutionary to him and so he became a sensitive and passionate promoter of the printed book of law through which he expressed a particularly modern vision of the legal system. His involvement in the collection of extravagans legislation and in the clarification of a set of glosse contributed decisively to determining the future physiognomy of the Corpus Iuris Canonici; the arrangement of the jurisprudence and the doctrine of the council board highlighted the tendential legislative value of these sources. His view of the rules of chancery in light of common law categories, which raised the question of the general or particular nature of administrative law, as well as a systematic analysis of the local church's governance mechanisms, seem to have marked an important shift in the slow clarification of administration as a legal discipline at the beginning of the modern age.