Gratian

(c. 1099 - c. 1159)

A Benedictine monk born around the turn of the twelfth century, Gratian was a lecturer at the Monastery of Saints Felix and Nabor in Bologna. For the Decretum Gratiani, a collection of works on church discipline, Gratian attempted to reconcile nearly four thousand texts from over the course of a millennium by using juristic methods newly developed by scholars of civil law at the University of Bologna. It remained the first volume in the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church until 1917.