Giovanni Andrea

 ANDREA, GIOVANNI (1275-1348), Italian canonist, was born at Mugello, near Florence, about 1275.  He studied canon law at Bologna, where he distinguished himself in this subject so much that he was made professor at Padua, and later at Pisa and Bologna, rapidly acquiring a high reputation for his learning and his moral character.  Curious stories are told of him; for instance, that by way of self-mortification he lay every night for twenty years on the bare ground with only a bear’s skin for a covering; that in an audience he had with Pope Boniface VIII. his extraordinary shortness of stature led the pope to believe he was kneeling, and to ask him three times to rise, to the immense merriment of the cardinals; and that he had a daughter, Novella, so accomplished in law as to be able to read her father’s lectures in his absence, and so beautiful, that she had to read behind a curtain lest her face should distract the attention of the students.  He is said to have died at Bologna of the plague in 1348, and an epitaph in the church of the Dominicans in which he was buried, calling him Rabbi Doctorum, Lux, Censor, Normaque Morum, testifies to the public estimation of his character.  Andrea wrote a Gloss on the Sixth Book of the Decretals, Closses on the Clementines and a Commentary on the Rules of Sextus. His additions to the Speculum of Durando are a mere adaptation from the Consilia of Oldradus, as is also the book De Sponsalibus et Matrimonio, from J. Anguisciola.