Preface to the 1991 Edition

The first Italian edition of this book was published in April 1988. The idea was to return to pathways well known to the specialists and point out the way to readers and scholars less familiar with them.

Although I hope that this book will continue to enjoy in its new guise the same good fortune it did during its first three years, I will look forward to making appropriate or necessary future revisions in the same spirit in which the book was first written and is now re­written.

Trappeto (Catania), March 1991

i. May 1988, May 1988, February 1989, June 1989, April 1991. The 1991 edition was reprinted in January 1993.

The idea of a book on the common legal past of Christian Europe first arose in Erice at the International School of Ius Commune, the directorship of which I have shared since 1987 with Stephan Kuttner, at Antonino Zichichi⁵S ^ccEttore Majorana Center for Scientific Cul­ture.⁵⁵ It was further developed in Catania as a way to offer students of the ^cceommon law,” the ius commune, an elementary guide to sup­plement their class lectures.

In both settings I have tried to adopt the viewpoint of readers who might, for a variety of reasons, want to know something about the ius commune.

A reader, for example, might sense that the various national law systems in Europe and the codes in which they have become crystal­lized (though not represented in their entirety) are in crisis. Or he or she might imagine a future in which national barriers will be in great part dismantled, in individual minds and in the collective awareness, and in which specific structures will become either anachronisms or a special province for speculation and fiscal legerdemain.

I hope to make a great epoch come to life again for people who are not professional students of the history Ofjurisprudence. In that great age between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries, Europe knew xvii

and practiced innumerable “particular laws”—iura propria—but that age was also Incontrovertibly the age of a sole, unique law, the ius commune or, more specifically, the utrumque ius, the Roman law and the law of the universal church.

This historical experience has now come to an end. Nonetheless, in the very act of becoming absorbed and surpassed by the internal logic of other perspectives, the real and ideal world of the ius commune stamped European law with some of the characteristics that to this day set it apart from other legal systems, in particular from the Anglo- American.

Another reason for returning once more to the ius commune is to give an account of the ideas that circulate among scholars today, some of which are universally accepted while others are challenged or are left to languish out of the spotlight. If we look to contemporary histo­riography for a work that will stimulate curiosity and debate on the historical processes that made European law what it is today, we will be faced with disappointments or a long search. The works that lay down the basic problems of the ius commune are either decidedly dated (Koschaker, Ermini, Cassandro), seem unaware of many events and ideas (Watson, Schrage), or present an interminable mass of ma­terials and information primarily useful to orient the research of scholars and provide them with a crutch for their memories (Coing).

One work alone has withstood the test of time and has for that rea­son become a classic in legal historiography: Francesco Calasso⁵S In- troduzione al diritto comune, a work first published in 1951 and devel­oped from the nucleus of his celebrated inaugural lecture, or “Prolusione di Catania,” entided “11 concetto di diritto comune” (1934). This incisive work immediately opened up vital and fertile new vistas to scholarship. For several decades now, entire generations of scholars have followed pathway indicated or intuited by Francesco Calasso and have produced valuable and relevant studies that go far beyond Calasso⁵S expectations. These works share a concrete sense of the epoch and its history, creating a compelling overview of the ius commune.

This is why it has seemed to me appropriate to dissect a number of studies and point out their component parts for the benefit of readers who might find it difficult to locate them within a sizable body of literature or within specific individual works Ofhistoriography.

As this work goes to press I want to express my cordial thanks to Dottore Francesco Migliorino, who has given so generously of his time and aid in the final phases of this work.

Trappeto (Catania), April 1988