Il De virtutibus moralibus di Giovanni da Legnano: un inedito commento teologico-giuridico all'Etica nicomachea

From the 1360s onwards, Giovanni da Legnano devoted himself to writing a series of theological treatises aimed at reconciling legal knowledge with the moral and political texts of Aristotle. The most important, and likely the first, of these was a treatise De virtutibus moralibus, a commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics punctuated with references to the ius commune. This article seeks, first of all, to place this work in relation with the broader context of contemporary theological treatises, as well as specific contemporary events in Bologna and in the life of the canonist; secondly, the treatise will be related to other writings that Giovanni da Legnano likely composed around the same time as part of a project to link them together in a broader arbor of interconnected works. Set against the rather sparse landscape of 14th-century Italian treatises on Aristotle’s Ethics, the De virtutibus moralibus stands out above all for its adoption of a peculiar legal-philosophical method; this is analysed in the last part of the article through a brief analysis of the structure of the work and of the content of the first part of the treatise (De iustitia).