Dante and the Law: The Influence of Legal Categories on 14th century Political Thought

The relationships between Church and Empire were intensively discussed in European canon and Civil Law schools from the 12th century onwards. The paper aims at analyzing the political thought of Dante in the light of the great legal debates which took place in these environments. Theological, legal and political dimensions cannot be considered separately in the intellectual perspective of the 14th century. The enduring controversy over whether Dante studied law is thus deliberately overshadowed by the belief that familiarity with legal questions was simply one element of a Trecento intellectual’s identity. In the following pages I will focus on the influence of late medieval legal debates on Italian political thought. I will start from the use of the Bible in Dante, who often relies on a theological-juridical interpretation of the Scriptures in order to discredit the most radical theses of the ecclesiastical legal thought of his time. I will then try to illustrate the reasons why Dante doesn’t condemn canon legal science as a whole, but makes a distinction between the ancient and respected legal thought of Gratian’s generation (12th century) – which supported the late-antique principle of non-interference between the two universal powers – and the new, hierocratic direction taken by the canon legal thought after the Gregorian Reform. The superiority of the spiritual world over the secular, claimed at length by the Church from the beginning of the 13th century, is considered by Dante, one century later, as the main source of political – and in his case, also personal – troubles. The last section of the paper is devoted to the concept of Empire in late medieval legal and political thought. I try to demonstrate why supporting the Empire cannot be reduced simply to the backing of one political faction, but it is rather expression of a sentiment of deep appreciation of the public function of imperial government, a sentiment that can be understood better if we take into account the studies on Roman public law undertaken by Italian and French lawyers in the last centuries of the Middle Ages.