Accursius and Odofredus

i263.

We know from the sure evidence of some annotations in manu­scripts that have come down to us—a few scattered observations among the glosses he was studying—that Accursius first concentrated on an attentive and impassioned study of the apparatus of Azo, his master, and Hugolinus.^{[167] [168] At first Accursius was keenly attuned to contemporary happenings and to episodes that could be used to illus­trate or clarify the laws of Justinian. This was already a custom that had given rise, in some of the schools (that of Jacobus Balduini for instance), to a current of thought and a methodological option that developed further in the following decades in both the official lessons (the lecturae} and the afternoon “exercises” (the quaestiones disputatae, quaestiones ex facto emergentes, quaestiones statutorum, and so forth). Around 1230, however, Accursius started to devote full time to the work that was to guarantee him immense fame throughout the cen­turies.}

Once again, legend masks the truth and mixes fact and fantasy. The idea of composing a text so complete and so polished that it could serve as an automatic exegetic accompaniment to the texts of Justini­an’s laws and merit a place beside them is supposed to have occurred, simultaneously, to Odofredus Denariis and to Accursius.

As is always the case, there is a kernel of truth behind the legend. Odofredus was indeed writing a major work, but he followed a differ­ent methodology from Accursius’s, and he became the leading expo­nent of a current of thought that not only resisted the overwhelming success of Accursius’s apparatus for decades but also was supported and carried on by great jurists up to the early years of the fourteenth century. Hence, from roughly 1230 on, there were two principal but divergent currents of thought: the first and dominant current was that of Accursius (and before him, Azo); the other, a persistent alter­native, that of Odofredus (derived from Hugolinus).^[169]

Odofredus’s work, known under the title of Lectura, was a vast commentary on the laws of Justinian. It was an expository work made up of lengthy passages elaborated and written by Odofredus, to which brief glosses supplementing them in one way or another were added.

The work that Accursius composed was more traditional in its ap­proach, because it was modeled on the apparatus of Azo (and, in part, on that of Hugolinus); it differed Iitde either in its expository tech­niques or in its interpretive methodology from the models that it imi­tated. It was an outstanding and valuable work, however, full of valu­able materials. Unlike Odofredus’s work—and unlike the work of Accursius himself in the first phase of his study of the apparatus of Azo and Hugolinus—all reference to actual events disappeared from it, even major events in living memory. The dross of the occasional and the contingent was perfectly eliminated; what remained were the concepts and doctrines in all their purity, principles and legal prob­lems, unadorned and thought through anew in their full abstraction but, at the same time, with full capacity and potential for serving the practical jurist and being replicated an infinite number of times in his practical activities, when he needed to define a legal case submitted to him for decision or a legal problem entrusted to his tutelage and defense.

Accursius finished this magnificent work because of his extraordi­nary command of the entire Corpus iuris civilis and thanks to the re­spect he showed to his models and his fidelity to them. He was in fact so faithful to Azo that his work has been criticized for lacking originality. In reality, however, it was not the novelty of their content that distinguished Accursius^,s glossae and his apparatus-, it was his for­midable achievement in selecting and integrating his materials. The work was made up for the most part of glosses—extrapolated from the apparatus of Azo and Hugolinus—which Accursius often repro­duced in their entirety, including the siglum at the foot of the com­ment that identified its author, or which on occasion he edited slightly by making cuts or additions. Into this basic outline Accursius inserted other glosses taken from various other jurists’ manuscripts, notably Johannes Bassianus (Azo’s master), Pillius, Placentinus, and, going further back in time, Rogerius, Martinus, Bulgarus, and Ime- rius. Selecting from among tens of thousands of annotations, Accur- sius found a place in his apparatus for more than ninety thousand glosses. They touch on all parts of the Corpus iuris civilis: the Digest (Digestum vetus, Infortiatum, and Digestum novum), the Code, the In­stitutes, the Tres libri, and the Novels. The enormous size of Accursius’s work gave it the title by which it has been known ever since: Magna glossa.

TheMagnaglossa contains all the principle themes of the jurispru­dence of the age—problems of equity, of worldly justice, and of the interpretation for which the jurist is responsible (within and outside the limits of the given law). It by and large neglects the problem of the ius proprium and its relationship, by its very existence and in its administration, to the ius commune. When used from this point of view, XheMagnaglossa offers excellent evidence of the most pressing topics of its time. As we have seen, however, the principal attraction of this work lay on the theoretical plane, where its analyses of legal doctrine and principles were of constant use to practice. TheAfzgjm glossa brought together a theoretical patrimony of truly inestimable value. For centuries it has offered that treasure to any jurist who might want to look beyond blind practice for ways to orient and improve the quality of his everyday activities and sharpen his technical skills.

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