148 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
indicating the position which an eminent lawyer of professed
orthodoxy could take towards the papacy on the eve of the
Reformation. It cost Decio an excommunication from Rome
but it became a document frequently cited during the Refor-
mation debates.
In his argument Decio maintained that a pope can be
brought to trial for scandal or crime as well as for heresy.
In the event of manifest delinquency a part or even one of
the college of cardinals can act for the whole body. Decio
no doubt built on theories already developed in the time of
Marsihus and Occam and elaborated during the debates of
the conciliar period. Nevertheless, his consilium contains some
ingenious reasoning on the ius Collegii and it represented a
considerable attack on the institutional position of the
papacy.
A still more daring attack on the institutions of the con-
temporary church came from the pen of Andrea Alciato, who
was universally regarded as the leading jurisconsultant of his
generation. Likewise a pupil of Del Maino, Alciato was a
Milanese educated at Pavia but his influence extended far
beyond that of his masters. He taught in France in the uni-
versities of Avignon and Bourges as well as in the great
Italian centers. He became the friend and correspondent of
Erasmus and many other humanists of his generation and
combined to a previously unprecedented degree a knowledge
of classical Uterature, history, and the sources of Roman law.
Indeed he became the founder of a new school of jurisprud-
ence, based on the principles of humanist exegesis with an
appreciation of the importance of the interpretation of the
Roman law as a living common law as it had been developed
by Bartolus and other practitioners of his school. He lived
through the first half of the sixteenth century and although in