Political language and horizons of expectation in Bologna between the 13th and 14th centuries

The study of an involuntary variation entered in a rubric on the election of the podesta, in the passage from the Bolognese statutes of 1288 to those of 1335, suggests some reflections on the political culture of some leaders and on the profound changes that took place in communal ideology in those decades. The total misunderstanding of an expression of dense neo-Platonic contents (ad instar superiorum ordinum) and its juridical normalisation (administrator superiorum ordinum)is in fact, first of all, indication of a change underway in the 1330s in the culture of the compilers and the statutory commissions where the juridical element had by then imposed its hegemony to the detriment of the philosophic-literary component, still deserving of note in the reports of the 13th century notary publics. On the political ideological level, the variation can be found in the change in horizon produced in Bologna after the city was put under direct papal sovereignty. The reflection between the church hierarchies and the communal institutions that appear in the rubrica of 1288 was in fact finalised towards a sacralisation of the commune and crowned a complex work of political theology underway for decades in the Bolognese environment. This operation was entirely thwarted in the 1300s by the new political developments that, involving the figure of the Pope and the sacrality of power, attributed to the organs of the commune a purely administrative role.