Abstract

The communal statutes of the 13th century contained a stratification of old and new resolutions in an order sometimes incoherent reflecting the existing balances of powers. A number of legal devices were used in order to harmonize them, such as formulas claiming that a given resolution would prevail on other ones, or claiming that its validity was limited to some specific fields, and so on. When a new resolution contrasted severely with the legal principles prevailing at the time an explicit motivation was added in order to justify its general necessity. The paper examines the motivated resolutions present in the statutes of Bologna, Perugia and Pisa, showing how their frequency increased during the century, while privileges got more and more widespread and the reasons adduced became more and more abstract, gradually introducing a new way of ruling.