Peter of Ravenna

This article deals with the legal scholar, for the bishop of the same name see Petrus Chrysologus .

Petrus von Ravenna (also Petrus Tomais, Petrus Ravennatus ; * around 1448 in Ravenna , † 1508 in Mainz ) was an Italian legal scholar .

Compendium juris civilis & Canonici , 1507

Life

Petrus von Ravenna already attracted attention in Padua when he was 20 years old when, as a student of Alexander da Imola (1424–1477), he was able to reproduce all the law of the time from his head. Thereupon he was appointed lector of the University of Padua . At the age of 24 he received his doctorate in both rights and aroused the admiration of his contemporaries with his amazing memory. He went to the University of Pisa in 1477 and returned to the University of Padua as Professor of Canon Law at the end of 1479 . In 1491 he published his technique of knowledge acceptance in Venice in the book Phoenix, sive artificiosa memoria .

In 1497, Duke Bogislaw X. von Pomerania brought the scholar to Greifswald to give his young state university the glamor of a famous Italian name. Petrus von Ravenna taught at the University of Greifswald for five years together with his son Vicentius; He also held the rectorate of the university in 1498 and 1501, among other things . When his daughter Margareta died in Pomerania in October 1502 at the age of 20, he intended to return to Italy . Bogislaw X. gave him a horse and 100 ducats for this purpose and provided him with a letter of recommendation that should make his return journey easier. When he was on his way back to his homeland, Friedrich the Wise made him an offer to teach at the newly founded University of Wittenberg . Peter of Ravenna accepted the offer and held his inaugural lecture on May 3, 1503 on the subject of the violence of the Pope and the Emperor . Among other things, he advocated the right of the emperor to found universities, which was used for the first time when the Wittenberg University was founded.

Petrus von Ravenna left Wittenberg because of the plague in the summer of 1506 and worked as a professor of law at the old University of Cologne . His dispute there with Jakob van Hoogstraten , in which he denounced the custom of the German authorities to leave the corpses of executed delinquents on the gallows, became known. In his opinion, these acted against the natural and divine law. Because of that argument, which was also reflected in literary terms, he gave up his professorship in Cologne and turned to Mainz , where he soon died.

meaning

Petrus' book Phoenix, sive artificiosa memoria offered an effective method to train the memory for the first time to a broad audience. He stripped memory of its religious context, into which it was previously put by Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics . After its first publication by Choris in Venice on January 10, 1491, the book was translated into numerous languages and was also published in Erfurt in 1500 and in Cologne in 1508 . From today's perspective one would speak of an international bestseller .

In 1491 the Republic of Venice granted Peter of Ravenna and a publisher of his choice a protective privilege against pirated prints of his book Phoenix . This privilege is considered to be the first demonstrable example of copyright protection.

Selection of works

• Phoenix, sive artificiosa memoria, Bernadinus de Choris, Venice 1491 (1500 Erfurt, 1508 Cologne, etc.)
• Repeticio. c. inter alia de emunitate ecclesiae. Lübeck: Lucas Brandis 1499. ( digitized in the digital library Mecklenburg-Vorpommern)
• Compendium juris civilis & Canonici ( la ). Hermann Bungart, Cologne 1507.
• De immunitate ecclesiae, Cologne 1503
• Alphabetum aureum utriusque juris, Cologne 1508
• Phoenicem sive ad memoriam comparandam introductionem, Cologne 1608
• Compendium in consvetudines feudorum, Cologne 1567
• Liberum sermonum, quos festis diebus auditoribus juris pronununciavit, Hermann Trebel, Wittenberg 1505
• Disp. De corpore suspensi in patibulo to remanere dabeat

See also

• List of rectors at the University of Greifswald

literature

• Johann August Ritter von Eisenhart :  Petrus Ravennas . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 25, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1887, pp. 529-539.
• Dieter Girgensohn :  Petrus Ravennas. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , p. 230 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Ravennas or de Ravenna, Peter a legal scholar. In: Johann Heinrich Zedler : Large complete universal lexicon of all sciences and arts . Volume 30, Leipzig 1741, column 1094.
• Richard Rogers Bowker: Copyright: Its History and Its Law. Being a Summary of the Principles and Practice of Copyright with Special Reference to Books. Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1912.
• Walter Friedensburg : History of the University of Wittenberg. Max Niemeyer, Halle (Saale) 1917.
• Theodor Pyl : Peter of Ravenna. In: Baltic Studies , Volume 20, Stettin 1864, pp. 149–164 ( online ).
• Roderich von Stintzing : History of the German jurisprudence. 1st department. R. Oldenbourg, Munich and Leipzig 1880, p. 261 f. ( Online )
• Theodor Muther: From university and scholarly life in the age of the Reformation. Andreas Deichert, Erlangen 1866.
• Frances A. Yates: Memory and Recall. Mnemonic from Aristotle to Shakespeare. Akademie Verlag, 2001, ISBN 3-05-003530-7 Excerpt from Google Book Search

Web links

• Petrus Ravennas in the repertory "Historical Sources of the German Middle Ages"

Footnotes

1. ↑ Theodor Pyl : Margareta von Ravenna: Pomeranian life picture from the fifteenth century . Greifswald 1865.