Giovanni d'Andrea

Giovanni d'Andrea or Johannes Andreæ (1270 × 1275 – 1348) was an Italian expert in canon law.

His contemporaries referred to him as iuris canonici fons et tuba ("the fount and trumpet of canon law").

[1] The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica related curious stories of him: 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 (yet it is known that he remained a layman, was married and had children); 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.

[2] He is reported to have died at Bologna of the Black Death 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.

Giovanni d'Andrea's output was voluminous: Among lesser works, his additions to the Speculum of Durandus are simply an adaptation from the Consilia of Oldradus de Ponte, as is also his De Sponsalibus et Matrimonio, from Johannes Anguisciola.