the will of the testator and the clausula “rebus sic stantibus” circumstances – coming from an ecclesiastical institute and asking to allocate a testamentary bequest to its needs instead of to the poor, contrary to the testator’s instructions, Petrus answers that there is no need for interpretation where the wording of the testament is clear, recalling one of the already mentioned traditional rules on testaments, and that in such a case it is not possible to derogate from the testator’s intention. From that moment onwards, the great masters of the ius commune legal science took the applicability of theclausulato dispositions of last will as a matter of course, expanded the theory, and passed it on to later scholarship. The list of acts present in Petrus’s consiliumn. 84 was later reproposed by Alexander Tartagnus (1423–1477) and Iason de Mayno (1435– 1519), among the most influential and respected jurists of their time, who added contracts to the list in their commentaries on D. 12.4.8.21 For what concerns the practical side of law – the judicial practice of the lateius commune system –, the effectiveness of theclausulawas almost unanimously accepted in matters of inheritance, and not only in relation to testaments. In particular, its potential was used to undermine the traditional and apparently unbreakable rule of the irrevocability and irrefragability of the renunciation of the gifted daughter from the paternal succession.22 In the first half of the 16th century, Robertus Maranta re230 21 Alexandri Tartagni In secundam Digesti veteris partem(ed. 1521), fol. 65r; Iasonis Mayni In secundam Digesti veteris partem(ed. 1623), fol. 126r, on both of which see Macino 2015, pp. 77–78. 22 The accepted rule, until at least the beginning of the 15th century, was that “foemina semel exclusa semper et in aeternum erit exclusa, nec ulterius admittetur etiam si liberi masculi qui semel fuerint haeredes patris postea moriantur” (once excluded, the female will remain forever excluded, and will no longer be eligible for succession even if the male children who were once heirs of the father are later dead); see e.g. Angeli a Gambilionibus Tractatus in materia testamentorum, in Rolandini Summa totius artis notariae (ed. 1574), fol. 275r, in which the opinions of other doctores are also included. It may be interesting to note that the applicability of the clausula on this point had been first argued in the commentary to D. 12.4.8 by one of Petrus de Ancharano’s teachers, Bartholomaeus a Salyceto – who with Petrus is also among the first to use the expression “rebus sic stantibus” in its canonical forThe general acceptance of the clausula inmatters of succession by late ius commune scholarship
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