"In sede apostolica specula constituti". Procedure curiali per l'approvazione di regole e testi normativi all'alba del IV concilio lateranense

From the 12th century onwards, the Roman Curia began to play an increasingly important role in the defi nition of the institutional form of new religiones. Specifically, it began to intervene, directly or through its delegates (bishops, religious, cardinals, Papal legates), to check the suitability of the normative texts disciplining the everyday life of communities, presented to the Curia for approval. Following on from the historiographical suggestions of Gert Melville and the Dresden school on the regulatory texts of the various regular communities, the normative bases of these texts and the role played by the authority in their development, this article specifi - cally examines the procedures introduced for the verifi cation, approval and confi rmation of rules or proposita vitae during the years of the papacy of Innocent III preceding the IVth Lateran Council. This research – focusing specifi cally on the papal approval of the Trinitarians, the Humiliati, the hermits of the Val des Choux, the canons of San Marco in Mantua, the Poor Catholics and the Reconciled Lombards – examines the intrinsic features of the letters of grace contained in the papal registers. This observation point makes it possible not only to reconstruct the exact iter of each approval but also to identify, in a comparative perspective, common features that return more frequently in each case and that during the 13th century began to take on the form of an increasingly well-defi ned juridical procedure.