The Twelfth-Century Renaissance and the Autonomy of the Law
Irnerius’s life spanned the years between the eleventh and the twelfth centuries (he died around 1130). He was a figure of mythical proportions, who symbolized the rebirth of European jurisprudence in Bologna[50]—a rebirth that, as we have seen, had begun around the mid-eleventh century but had not found a way to express or manifest itself completely or in any one place.
The novelty of Irnerius5S work lay mainly in the idea that the texts of the Justinian compilation (the Hbri legates, as contemporary sources called them) could be used to give a concrete response to anyone who might want to use the law rather than arms to defend his interests.
We do not know whether this idea was Irnerius5S alone or whether it had occurred to others before him. Many indications suggest that a current of thought had arisen during the final decades of the eleventh century that had turned more and more toward Roman law, and that a need to know the original texts had kept pace with that interest.
In Bologna as in other cities, what is more, we have increasing evidence of indices, causidici, sapientes, and legum docti, and there are a few personalities, remembered for various reasons, who stand out from the growing mass of people now occupied primarily or exclusively with legal problems. In Bologna we can find a certain Lam- bertus, whom Odofredus later called antiquus doctor, and a certain Ubaldus, who annotated a few passages in Justinian’s laws.[51] [52] Pepo (or Pepone) was better known than those early figures, although little more than his name remains now.5 He must have been famous in his day if nearly a century later an English writer, Ralph Niger (d. ca. 1210), could mention him favorably in a work written between 1170 and 1189 and give valuable information on him. In a context in which a number of “jurists” operated, then, Irnerius concentrated on the Hbri Icgales (Justinian’s laws) which were in circulation in Bologna and other parts of central and northern Italy (at the least in Tuscany, Ravenna, Pavia, and Verona) but perhaps not yet in Provence or north of the Alps in general, where an interest in Roman law was nonetheless already fairly strong: ccUp to now they [the Hbri legates} had been neglected and no one had studied them,” Burchard OfBiberach (d. after 1231), the provost of Ursberg from 1215 to 1226, declared in his chronicle.[54] 4.