«Pro tota iuris decretalium ulteriore evolutione»: le declarationes della Congregazione del Concilio e le loro raccolte dei secoli XVI e XVII fra divieti e diffusione

There is no doubt that the Congregation of the Council with its declarationes made an important contribution to the development of Canon law during the post-Tridentine era. The essay highlights how, despite the importance of these interpretative pronouncements of the Tridentine decrees to which the value of general laws was recognized, for a long time there was no official publication of them. The attempt to remedy this difficulty in knowing an important part of the laws of the Roman Church by drafting numerous handwritten and printed collections of these declarationes is examinated in this essay which also explains how, being a result of private initiatives without sufficent guarantees of conformity to the originals, they were banned by the Holy See and put on the Index of prohibited books.