Cresconius Africanus (Crisconius) was aLatincanon lawyer, of uncertain date and place. He flourished, probably, in the latter half of the 7th century. He was probably aChristianbishop of the African Church.

Cresconius made a collection of canons, known asConcordia canonum, inclusive of theApostolic Canons, nearly all the canons of the fourth- and fifth-century councils, and manypapal decretals from the end of the fourth to the end of the fifth century. It was much used as a handy manual of ecclesiastical legislation by the churches of Africa andGaul as late as the tenth century. Few of its manuscripts postdate that period.^[1]

The content is taken from the collection ofDionysius Exiguus, but the division into titles (301) is copied from theBreviatio canonum ofFulgentius Ferrandus, a sixth-century deacon of Carthage. In many manuscripts the text of Cresconius is preceded by an index or table of contents (breviarium) of the titles, first edited in 1588 byPithou.

In its entirety the work wasfirst published byVoellus andJustellus.^[2] One of its best manuscripts, the tenth-centuryVallicellianus (Rome), has a note in which Cresconius is declared the author of a metrical poem called "Bella et victorias" by the "Patricius" Johannes in Africa about the Saracens. This was formerly interpreted to mean the African victory of the ByzantinePatricius Johannes in 697, hence the usual date of Cresconius. Some, however, hold that the poem in question is theJohannis ofFlavius Cresconius Corippus, a Latin poet of about 550, and on this basis identify him with the canonist, thus placing the latter in the sixth century. Others (withMaassen, p. 810) while admitting that the poem in question can be none other than theJohannis of the aforesaid Latin poet (unknown toFabricius, and first edited bySamuel Mazzuchelli, Milan, 1820), maintain that it has been wrongly attributed to this Cresconius, and that it cannot therefore aid in fixing his date.

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Cresconius".Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

• Canon law jurists
• 7th-century writers in Latin
• 7th-century Byzantine writers
• Byzantine jurists
• 7th-century poets
• Byzantine poets
• 7th-century jurists

• Articles incorporating a citation from the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia with Wikisource reference
• Articles incorporating text from the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia with Wikisource reference