Bullarium - Origins

Origins

The name bullarium seems to have been invented by the canonist Laertius Cherobini who in 1586 published under the title "Bullarium, sive Collectio diversarum Constitutionum multorum Pontificum". It was a large folio volume of 1404 pages containing 922 papal constitutions from Gregory VII down to Sixtus V, the pope then reigning.

With regard to this and all subsequent collections, three things have carefully to be borne in mind. First, whatever may have been the intrinsic importance or binding force of any of the bulls so published, the selection itself was a matter that depended entirely upon the arbitrary choice of the various editors. As a collection the publication had no official character. The only recognized exception to this assertion is the first volume of a collection of his own bulls which was sent by Benedict XIV in 1746 to the University of Bologna to serve as a fons iuris, or source of legal principles. Secondly, it was never seriously maintained, despite some pretentious title pages, that these collections were in any sense complete, or that they even contained all the constitutions of more general interest. Thirdly, it was the intention of the editors, at least at first, rather to exclude than to include the papal pronouncements which had already been incorporated into the text of canon law. The avowed object of the early collections was to render assistance to canonists by bringing within their reach papal enactments which either had been overlooked by the compilers of the "corpus" or which had been issued subsequently to the latest decrees included in it.

Various collections of relatively recent papal constitutions were published in the early part of the sixteenth century. A typical specimen of such booklets is supplied by a rare little volume of sixty-two pages printed at Rome per Stephanum Guillereti in regione Parionis 1509, a copy of which is in the British Museum Library. A contribution of more substantial volume appears to have been a volume edited by Mazzutellus in 1579 which contained 723 documents. But it is to Laertius Cherubini that the credit is usually given of creating the bullarium in substance as well as in name. In the preface to the volume of which the title has already been given, the editor refers to his experiences in the ecclesiatical courts of Rome. In these courts I have noticed (he says) that certain advocates and judges went completely astray because they had not at hand the text of those apostolic constitutions a knowledge of which is most necessary in treating and pronouncing upon causes, seeing that in such constitutions is embodied the whole of the most recent pontifical law.

After this explanation it is not surprising to find that out of Cherubini's 922 documents more than 800 were of recent date, that is to say they belonged to the hundred years immediately preceding the appearance of the volume. Of this collection, a second edition in three volumes, was printed at Rome in 1617, and a third edition in four volumes extending in this case from Leo I to Urban VIII, was prepared by the editor's son, Angelo Cherubini, in 1638, with a supplement added in 1659. Other editions followed, always somewhat enlarged. The fifth in six volumes was brought out by two Franciscans at Rome, 1669–72.