An Alternative Line of Thought in the Thirteenth Century

The current that provided an alternative to the Glossa ordinaria con­tinued for several decades, lasting at least into the early fourteenth century. It is attested in the use, well after Accursius’s lifetime, of the apparatus of Hugolinus, continued and supplemented by Jacobus Balduini, Benedetto of Isernia, and Roffredus Beneventanus.

In other instances it was the work of Azo that survived, not because a current of thought different and distinct from that of Accursius de­veloped from it, but rather because the apparatus of Azo remained, buried and forgotten, in a few ecclesiastical libraries, where they had been put during the early thirteenth century by a monk or a canon who had studied jurisprudence in Bologna, had commissioned the local stationarii to copy some works in a fine hand, and had later brought them back with him when he returned to his homeland.

Thus Hugolinus⁵S apparatus were in use and continued to be stud­ied with lively interest. The legal thought that derived from them had its own unique characteristics reflecting the intellectual personality of Odofredus—a personality that should be seen in the context of a thought that had developed even before Odofredus began to teach and that continued in his day.

The annotations that came from this current of thought included frequent references to everyday events. Although these may have de­tracted from the limpidity of the juridical discourse, they gave it such concreteness and anchored it so firmly in the real world that the theo­retical potential of the many legal concepts was enhanced—concepts that juridical doctrine controlled and used with masterful skill.

Among the scholars in this second line of thought, one man soon stood out: Roffredus Beneventanus, who was active during the first half of the thirteenth century and came from the prominent Epifani family. Although the documents are still in part lost or have not been studied adequately, we can see that Roffredus’s thought bore the stamp of Odofredus, particularly in his examples and the tone of “fes­tiveness” that made his writing particularly attractive. They also re­veal interests unusual in a civilian of those years, however, because Roffredus made frequent, cultivated and relevant use of canon law.^[179]

Roffredus also showed a tendency (which became explicit in some sectors of jurisprudence in the latter half of the thirteenth century) to take account of the needs of practice and to offer practical remarks in which the theory of the ius commune was translated into concrete institutional applications, particularly in regard to court procedures. Roffredus left two works on Iibelli_y one on civil law and the other on canon law, containing examples of legal documents useful as models for practical jurists.

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