TheMagnaglossa: Authoritative Text and Sure Guide
Toward the mid-thirteenth century, the Magna glossa was universally accepted as an essential and standard accompaniment to the texts ofjustinian.
Some manuscripts that contained only the laws of Justinian (and had sufficiently empty margins) were used to copy the glosses of Ac- cursius’s apparatus next to the laws to which they pertained.
On occasion apparatus of Azo or Hugolinus or anonymous networks of glosses were erased by the usual technique of scraping the margins of the parchment leaf, and the freed space was used to transcribe portions of the glossa instead (which is why such reworked manuscripts are called palimpsests, from the Greek for “rescraped”). When new codices were made, Justinian’s laws were always accompanied by the Magnaglossa, often copied in the same hand. In this manner the laws lent some of their sacrality to the apparatus, and in their reflected glory Accursius’s Glossa became as untouchable as the laws themselves.
The Iibvi legales and the Magna glossa were surrounded by something like a sea of orality that highlighted and increased the permanence and the sacred aura of the legal writings. We would have no knowledge of this vast amount of thought expressed verbally if it were not for the few traces—some more fully elaborated and better thought out than others—that it has left in writing.[170]
From the mid-thirteenth century on, the diffusion of the Magna glossa in Europe reached impressive proportions. It became such a common custom of the schools to accompany the Hbvi Iegales with Accursius’s Magnaglossa that it came to be called Glossa ordinaria.
We can find copies of Accursius’s Glossa ordinaria in all regions of Christian Europe—on the Iberian Peninsula, where one of Accursius’s sons, Guglielmo (Guillelmus Accursii), went to teach civil law,[171] in France, especially in the pays de droit cent, where we find the same Guillelmus Accursii,[172] in Germany in monasteries and the libraries of cathedral chapters and collegial churches, in what is now Switzerland,[173] and in many other European lands.[174]
On occasion the statutes of Italian cities (Padua, for one)[175] required the judges to own a copy of the Hbri legates—further proof, should it still be necessary, that not only was the ius commune used as the third degree of positive law (after statuta and consuetudines) but it had validity beyond the hierarchy of norms and independent of that hierarchy.[176]
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