Andreas, John

, a famous canonist of the fourteenth century, born at Mugello, near Florence. He was very young when he went to Bologna to pursue his studies, and would have found great difficulty to maintain himself, had he not got a tutor’s place, by which means he was enabled to apply himself to the study of the canon law, in which he made great progress under the professor Guy de Ba‘if. He had always a particular respect for this professor, paying as great deference to his glosses as the text itself. Gujr de Ba’if, perceiving that Andreas, for want of money, could not demand his doctor’s degree, procured it him gratis, which Andreas himself acknowledges. The same professor urged him to stand for a professorship, which he obtained, and was professor at Padua about the year 1330; but he was recalled to Bologna, where he acquired the greatest reputation. We are told wonderful things concerning the austerity of his life, that he macerated his body with prayer and fasting, and lay upon the bare ground for twenty years together, covered only with a bear-skin: but according to Poggius, he was not afterwards so extremely rigid in discipline or morals.

Andreas had a beautiful daughter, named Novella, whom he is said to have instructed so well in all parts of learning, that when he was engaged in any affair, which hindered him from reading lectures to his scholars, he sent his | daughter in his room; when, lest her beauty should prevent the attention of the hearers, she had a little curtain drawn before her. To perpetuate the memory of this daughter, he entitled his commentary upon the Decretals of Gregory X. “the Novelloe.” He married her to John Calderinus, a learned canonist. The first work of Andreas was his Gloss upon the sixth book of the Decretals, Rome 1476, and five editions afterwards at Pavia, Basil, and Venice. This work he wrote when he was very young. He wrote also Glosses upon the Clementines, Strasburgh, 147 I, and Mentz, Rome, and Basil, four times; and a Commentary in Regulas Sexti, which he entitled “Mercuriales,” because he either engaged in it on Wednesdays, diebus Mercurii, or because he inserted his Wednesday’s disputes in it. He enlarged the Speculum of Durant, in the year 1347, but this is taken literally from Ostradus. Andreas died of the plague at Bologna in 1348, after he had been a professor forty-five years, and was buried in the church of the Dominicans. Many eulogiums have been bestowed upon him: he was called archidoctor decretorum; in his epitaph he has the title of “Rabbi doctorum, lux, censor, normaque morum;” or, rabbi of the doctors, the light, censor, and rule of manners; and it is said that pope Boniface called him “lumen mundi,” the light of the world. Bayle objects, that Andreas followed the method of the Pyrrhonists too much; that he proved his own opinion very solidly when he chose, but that he often rather related the sentiments of others, and left his readers to form their own determination. ¹