An awakening of learning in the field…
1100 CE
An awakening of learning in the field of law occurs in Bologna around 1100, under the guidance of Irnerius and his students, who resurrect and study Justinian's codes.
Imerius, born in Bologna about 1050, had at the urging of Countess Matilda of Tuscany begun to devote himself to the study of jurisprudence, taking the Justinian code as a guide.
After teaching jurisprudence for a short while in Rome he had returned to Bologna, where he founded a new school of jurisprudence in 1084 or 1088, which soon rivaled the law school of Ravenna.
Some jurisprudence had been taught at Bologna, before Irnerius founded his school, by Pepo and a few others, and a tradition of jurisprudence had developed at Pavia since the mid-ninth century.
Irnerius has introduced the custom of explaining the Roman law by means of glosses, which originally were meager interlinear elucidations of the text.
But since the glosses were often too extensive to be inserted between the lines of the text, he began to write them on the margin of the page, thus being the first to introduce the marginal glosses which afterwards come into general use.
The Eastern Emperor Justinian's early sixth century law code, Corpus Juris Civilis, although it had been distributed in the West, had scarcely been needed in the comparatively primitive conditions that followed the loss of the Exarchate of Ravenna by the Empire in the eighth century.
The only western province where the Justinianic code was effectively introduced was Italy, following its recovery by imperial armies in the mid-sixth century, but a continuous tradition of Roman law in medieval Italy has not been proven.
Historians disagree on the precise way it was recovered.
or accidentally rediscovered, in Northern Italy about 1070, coincidental with the Gregorian Reforms of Pope Gregory VII Aside from the Littera Florentina, a sixth-century codex of the Pandects that was preserved at Pisa, apparently without ever being publicly consulted (and removed to Florence after Florence conquered Pisa in 1406), there may have been other manuscript sources for the text that began to be taught at Bologna, by Pepo and then by Irnerius.
The latter's technique is to read a passage aloud, which permits his students to copy it, then to deliver an excursus explaining and illuminating Justinian's text, in the form of glosses.
Locations
Groups
Regions
Southwest Europe
View →Subregions
