Late Medieval Hospital Reforms and the Canon Law

Abstract

The inquiry is inspired by the author's interest in late medieval concepts of reform, and focuses specifically on the concrete case of hospital reforms. Since the structure of reform discourse is closely connected to legal arguments, the article concentrates on selected canonistic texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries concerning hospitals: the Tractatus hospitalitatis by Johannes Lapo of Castiglione (about 1370) and some commentaries on the Clementine decretal Quia contingit (1312/1317). The analysis deals with legal arguments which are relevant to reform (e.g. the convertibility a hospital founder’s testament), and furthermore discusses key notions related to problems like the affiliation of hospitals with the legal sphere of the Church. The ambivalence of canonistic arguments, which may either foster or prevent reform initiatives, is evident in the use of narrative figures such as the tension between origins and the present (i.e. the foundation of a hospital and its later evolution). Jurists employed such rhetoric devices to address the problem of the relationship between time and the development of law, but at the same time these narrative figures have a structural affinity with reform discourse. It may be concluded that the most important contribution of late medieval canonists to hospital reforms does not consist in straightforward instructions pro or contra reform, but in the fact that canon law elaborated the conditions that made it possible to think of reform.