A largely unknown figure, Pepone left traces of himself as an expert jurist at the court of the Canossa family, who also ruled Bologna in the late 11th century. It is therefore understandable that his name should have become familiar to the University of Bologna, which was established in those very years. Odofredo Denari's account of him in the 13th century, dug up by Carducci for his speech for the celebrations of the 8th centenary of the Alma Mater Studiorum, draws a picture of a hybrid figure, already experienced in sifting through the Corpus Iuris Civilis, but not yet ready to explain and disseminate it, as the more illustrious Irnerio would later do.
Despite numerous investigations and studies, it is still difficult to talk about Pepone.
He was probably a jurist from Tuscany, whose activities were linked to the court of Canossa during the difficult period of the Investiture Controversy of the late 11th century.
His name appears in numerous judicial deeds drawn up by the Canossian court between 1072 and 1079. He was defined as ‘advocatus” in the placita of Calceraki (1072), Puntiglo (1078) and Ferrara (1079) and as ‘legis doctor’ in the placitum of Marturi (1076). The latter document details a quotation made by Pepone of a passage from the Digesto section of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, which had fallen into oblivion throughout the early Middle Ages.
Knowledge of this Justinian text was to become fundamental to Irnerio's teaching and to the birth of the University of Bologna, thus leading to the hypothesis that Pepone must have lived in the city.
Both Azzone and his disciple Odofredo Denari, scholars of the Alma Mater in the 13th century, cited him as the initiator of legal education: Azzone compared him to Tiberius Coruncanio, traditionally considered the first professor of Roman Law; and Odofredo told his students about the scholar's precocity in approaching the Corpus, while emphasising his inability to disseminate it (the city is not specified) – something that instead brought Irnerio, 'lucerna iuris', to fame.
A higher recognition was given to Pepone in France. In his Moralia Regum, the English theologian Radulphus Niger (12th c.), a student and later a lecturer at the University of Paris, presents Magister Pepone as an ‘aurora surgens’, extolling his speech during a Lombard placitum held before Emperor Henry IV. To prove the fame achieved beyond the Alps, it is worth mentioning the references made to Pepone in a commentary to a Summa Institutionum (approx. 1125), in tracing the etymology of the term mutuum, and in a commentary to the Codice, handed down from manuscripts of the mid-12th century, in tracing the interpretation of the word embola.
In terms of tracing Pepone back to Bologna, Bishop Gualtiero of Siena referred to him as ‘clarum Bononiensium lumen’ in his De utroque apostolico (approx. 1090), an account in verse containing a note, perhaps added later, indicating Pepone as 'episcopus Bononiensis'.
It is precisely from this annotation that Pietro Fiorelli put forward the hypothesis of Pepone being Bologna’s schismatic bishop Pietro, on the assumption that the name Pepo derived from Petrus. Carlo Dolcini, instead, identified him as Pietro Crassus of Ravenna, jurist and author of the famous Defensio Heinrici IV regis.
More recent research, such as that by Giovanna Nicolaj, however, does not give credence to the long-standing belief that Pepone had links with Bologna, despite admitting the possibility of the name Pepo deriving from Pietro.
The fact remains that, whoever Pepone was, he left behind him evidence that, by the end of the 11th century, the Liberal Arts schools and the legal professions had long since set out on the road to the revival of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, which in the 12th century, through the Alma Mater Studiorum, became the foundation of Europe’s cultural and political renewal.