The Glossae

From the time of Imerius, jurists expressed their thoughts above all in a literary form determined by untouchable, authoritative legislative texts and by an exegetic technique aimed at furthering understanding of the content of those texts.

If over the years some professors and a good many students had not noted down their glossae on parchment as a way of documenting and remembering the Iecturae., we would know little or nothing of that world of ideas, beliefs, and values today. Thanks to them, we can manage to know something—on the condition that we keep in mind that the glossae were only an extremely feeble projection of a much fuller investment of both individual and collective reflection, and that we remember that they are a fragmentary and highly reductive expres- sion of the oral activities that revolved around a central nucleus of the few certain, authoritative, and sacred texts.

The gloss is a brief annotation composed and written to explain a text and addressing either its terminology and its exterior trappings or its animating spirit and its underlying principles. The more usual position for a gloss was beside a legislative text on one margin of the page or the other. At times a word, a very few words, or even an entire passage in explanation of a term used in the text was written between one line of the text and another. The technical term for the first is a “marginal gloss”; for the second, an “interlinear gloss.”

The jurists of the twelfth century and the first half of the thirteenth century made wide use of this literary form and of the technique it involved. The gloss continued to be used widely until at least the first decades of the fifteenth century, but its significance changed as the elaboration of theory and didactic methods for the transmission of legal knowledge evolved.

The glosses of innumerable masters remain in the hundreds of ex­tant manuscripts of Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis, or the Iibri legates. Innumerable masters composed them: Martinus, Bulgarus, Roge- rius, Albericus de Porta Ravennata, Henricus de Bayla, Placentinus, Pillius Medicinensis, Johannes Bassianus, Guillelmus de Cabriano, Azo, Hugolinus de Presbyteris, Jacobus Balduini, Carlo of Tocco, Benedetto of Isernia, RofFredus Beneventanus, and many others. Each one of these jurists composed glosses in the school and for the school, and in particular for that central exercise of official pedagogy that was the “lesson.”

Glosses were short and synthetic; they strove for clarity and an ef­ficacious use of few words. The text of a gloss might be written by the professor himself, before or after the lesson, or it might come from notes taken by one or more of the particularly gifted pupils. A professor’s note is termed a.glossa redacta; a student’s note a glossa re­portata.

Aglossa redacta normally closes with a sign or “siglum” made up of one or more of the letters in the professor’s name: for example, we have “y.” or “w.” for Irnerius, “m.” for Martinus, “b.” for Bulgarus, “r.”, “ro.”, or “rog.” for Rogerius, “Sy.” for Simon Vicentinus, “Ro.” or “Rof.” for Roflfredus, and so forth. The glossa reportata can be dis­tinguished from Xheglossa redacta because at its end the reportator (the person who had listened to the lesson and then written the gloss) at-

131 tested that he was not the author of the thought expressed but only the author of its formal redaction by noting “secundum m[artinum]” or “secundum b[ulgarum]" and the like. We need to take care, how­ever, to distinguish between the “secundum.. of thej⅛w^ reporta­tae and a “secundum...” followed by a name, which introduced the opinion of another jurist, perhaps even from another generation, within the body of a glossa redacta or aglossa reportata.

4.