�Traditional” Jurists in Publishing and the Book Markets

The last great season of the ius commune in its fourteenth-century guise took place in practice, inaugurated by works written above all in Italy. Furthermore, it was not only professors and legal consultants who were responsible for this late flowering; a new attempt to prove the “practical” validity of the ius commune as Bartolus had constructed and used it came from a completely different quarter, one in which shrewd businessmen made fortunes.

The sixteenth century was a golden age for printing. After Johan­nes Gutenberg’s first successful experiments in Mainz between 1440 and 1455 and the first printers’ refined editions (incunabula), book production thrived in a number of cities: Mainz, Frankfurt am Main, Paris, Rome, and, above all, Venice in Italy and Lyons in France.

It is instructive to glance at the catalogues of what the leading print­shops of the time produced, or at the lists of their best clients, the jurists. In the middle of an age of juridical reform, between legal hu­manism and the “Secunda Scholastica,” the great works of the recent past were republished repeatedly. If there were acid-tongued human­ists who vented their critical humors by coining picturesque insults for the jurists of the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries (Accur- sius and Bartolus in particular), there were also energetic printer-pub­lishers ready to invest capital and labor and to run the entrepreneurial risk of printing the Magna glossa of Accursius or the Commentaria of Bartolus of Saxoferrato, Baldus de Ubaldis, Johannes Andreae, and many others. In other words, the publishing business took over the scholarly production of jurists from the recent and the not-so-recent past and printed thousands of copies of their works. It was obviously good business to put on the market works that embodied the “sys­tem” of the ius commune from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

Everything was published, not only the greatest works. We cannot say that this publishing boom resulted from the humanists’ ardent de­sire for a knowledge of ancient Roman law that shifted to an interest in legal works of the more recent past as a way to trace the legal ves­tiges of a great civilization. This may have happened in some cases. Some publishers may have been interested in offering “historical” tes­timony of the past, and their efforts may have coincided with a similar interest on the part of the reader. If that had indeed been the case, however, few copies would have been produced and even fewer sold.

The fact is, however, that thousands of copies of Accursius’s Magnaglossa were printed (in five large folio volumes in the richest editions; in quarto format for less luxurious editions), and equal numbers of the immense commentaria and the lesser works of Barto- Ius of Saxoferrato (a total of ten folio volumes!). Hence it is obvious that the public for these works cannot have been made up only of a handful of cultivated humanists eager to know the past; it must have included judges, lawyers, professors, and students, who used that rich legacy of works in their everyday activities and who used them as tools and as a vital part of their present, not their past. This is even clearer with such works as Azo’s Summa, a work that went back to the twelfth century and that was offered as a volume of manageable size still extremely useful in the courtroom; or the Speculum iudiciale of Guilhelmus Durantis, a thirteenth-century work that in practical application even became Speculum iuris, or the great j7αwαe ordinariae to the texts of the Corpus iuris canonici. I might also note that in 1582 the CorrectoresRomani gave their approval to print the most important glossed edition of the Corpus iuris civilis of its day.

For nearly two centuries, the printing presses worked ceaselessly to print works on the ius commune, slowing only in the 1620s or 30s.

Everything was printed, at times with little success, which meant that some examples of the older writings became rare (and are even rarer today). Among these were the Lecturae of Odofredus Denariis (a thirteenth-century work) and the summae on the Code and the Insti­tutes of an even older jurist, Placentinus (twelfth century).

Some of the books that were printed—collections of scattered ma­terials and uncertain and incomplete depositions gathered together and reworked—contained writings not originally conceived as one work. As far as we know in the current state of scholarship, this was how the commentaria of Jacobus de Arena and Jacobus Buttrigarius the Elder were “constructed,” and, in all probability, those of Baldus de Ubaldis (taken from his Iecturae from a number of years) as well— all jurists of the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries.

Works that the older jurists had never written were also printed— forgeries, works falsely and surreptitiously attributed to famous ju­rists. Obviously there were people who sought them and bought them.^[238] The authorship of a work might be changed if the publisher thought it convenient: thus a Iectura on the Code by Jacques de Re­vigny (Jacobus de Ravanis, thirteenth century) was attributed to Pierre de Belleperche (Petrus de Bellapertica).^[239]

“Historical concentration” was particularly intense concerning works published under the name of Bartolus—which simply demon­strates the continuing importance of “Bartolism” in Europe, particu­larly for practical jurists, who earned and spent money and who formed the market for legal publishing in the sixteenth and seven­teenth centuries and guaranteed its success, both in cultural and eco­nomic terms.

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