Summa of Summas, Called the Silvestrina

On Simony

De simonia

The entry De simonia from the Secunda pars of Sylvester Prierias's Summa Sylvestrina, his alphabetical compendium of moral and canonical cases of conscience. Prierias treats the question in roughly thirty numbered articles, beginning from the term's derivation from Simon Magus and the canonical definition of simony as the studied will to buy or sell things spiritual or annexed to the spiritual. He works through the classification of spiritual things, the species of simoniacal pact, the question of when simony arises in ordinations and the conferral of benefices, the role of patron and presenter, the limits of papal dispensation, the obligation of restitution, and the penalties — drawing throughout on Aquinas, Hostiensis, Innocent IV, Antoninus, Cajetan and the canonist tradition. The article is among the most thorough confessor's-manual treatments of simony to appear in print on the eve of the Reformation, and through its forty-plus editions became a standard reference for sixteenth-century moral theology.

Silvester Prierias·1515·Latin·Secunda pars, s.v. Simonia·fol. 3.259rb–3.268ra