From Lecturae to Commentaria
It was out of this context that the Lecturae of Cinus of Pistoia sprang, as well as the Commentaria of Giovanni d’Andrea (Johannes Andreae), Bartolus of Saxoferrato, Bartolomeo of Saliceto, and a very few other jurists of the fourteenth and the early fifteenth centuries— Paulus de Castro, for example, among the civilians, and Niccolo dei Tedeschi (Nicolaus de Tudeschis; known as Panormitanus) among the canonists.
Commentaria have at least two characteristics that distinguish them from the other works of the time. From the point of view of their form, they were the product of a personal and meditated reelaboraÂtion of a range of heterogeneous materials that had accumulated, layer after Iayerprr viam additionum, during the course of Iecturae on Justinian’s laws and on the Glossa ordinaria of Accursius. Thus they were works in a particular “form” that the author had chosen deliberÂately for a definitive expression of his thought. From the point of view of their substance, they were works of homogeneous content covering one complete part of the Iibri Iepfales—the Code, for example, or the Digestum vetus.
Because the commentarium was a new literary genre and, above all, because of the fame and the authority of the Commentaria of Bartolus of Saxoferrato, historiography calls all fourteenth-century jurists “commentators,” a term that is decidedly inappropriate or inadequate for a good many of these men.
The differences between the commentum and the Iectura (in its variÂous documented forms and even in its written fragments) had a numÂber of consequences. First, only the commentum was made up of a definite text that circulated in the written form conceived by its auÂthor. For this reason, we find it in the same form in a variety of manuÂscripts.
Second, both the lectura, per viam additionum and the Iectura per viam quaestionum showed variations in their documentation, because even one course of lessons could appear in different formal guises that reflected the talents or the interests of the person who captured in one or more written phrases thoughts that the professor had exposed orally.
When this happened, the circulation of that thought was not linked to the stability or the unity of one written “form,” precisely because the original means of expression was oral. Hence manuscripts seldom correspond literally, even when they document the same thought and the same lesson.Third, a partial reelaboration of this varied documentation led to reworking the material (that is, the additiones) that had accumulated on the margins of the Iibri legates and Accursius’s Glossa. At times it was the professor himself who selected additiones written or rewritten by himself or by others and who arranged them in a stable order; at other times this task was done by someone else who made use of the texts—a student, another professor, or a practicing jurist or judge sensitive to the use of the ius commune. These two procedures alterÂnate in the Supleciones of Guido of Suzzara and the Casus of Riccardo of Saliceto.
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