Arguing the law with Nicolaus Everardi

In the early sixteenth century some changes become already visible in the way lawyers approached the law. Not only was there a growing interest in the history of Roman and canon law, but lawyers began to free themselves from the framework offered by these legal systems. One of the signs of this are the titles of legal treatises, the growth itself of this genre, and a more systematic approach of law. Nicolaus Everardi’s book on legal argumentation, his Topicorum seu de locis legalibus liber (Louvain 1516) is an example of this development. The book of this Dutch lawyer who presided the Court of Holland and the Great Council of Malines became almost a bestseller because of the reprints published everywhere in Europe. Printers in Bologna, Basel, Paris, Lyon, Strasbourg, Venice, Frankfurt am Main and Cologne printed this book until the mid-seventeenth century. I have found eight reprints of the first edition and eighteen of the second edition.

On the blog of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Frühe Neuzeit Klaus Graf recently criticized sharply the new database Early Modern Thought Online (EMTO) of the Fernuniversität Hagen that enables you to search for editions of texts in the broad field of early modern philosophy and thought. The EMTO database notes in the search results the availability of online versions. In this respect Graf saw major shortcomings, because EMTO does not harvest its results from some of the major sources for early modern texts online. During my searches in digital libraries I have often looked for a digitized copy of an edition of Nicolaus Everardi’s book on which I wrote my Ph.D. thesis. Against all expectations it was EMTO that finally brought me to a digitized edition of the Topicorum liber, often printed with the title Loci argumentorum legales. More in line with Klaus Graf’s review is the fact EMTO includes only one digitized edition from a library where in fact several editions of it have been digitized, including the editio princeps of 1516. Graf ends his short review with recommending a search strategy. The German Wikisource website has a page on the creation of bibliographies and the collection of bibliographical data which amounts to a guide for searching digitized books. The proof of the pudding of a search strategy or a database is its practical use and effectiveness, so let’s proceed to test it for Nicolaus Everardi (around 1492-1532).

EMTO points to an edition of Everardi’s book made available by Google Books. However, a quick look at the book shows a shelf number and a book mark of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. Google Books indicates more editions have been digitized, and it is strange EMTO does not include this information. Until recently the Digitale Sammlungen formed the only gateway to the books and manuscripts digitized at Munich. These rich collections contain digitized works of Everardi’s name sake, Nicolaus Everardi of Ingolstadt (1495-1570). The new OPACPlus offers more search possibilities than the Digitale Sammlungen. It appears not only editions of the Topicorum liber have been digitized but also his Consilia (Arnhem 1642, a late edition) and even four editions of the Synopsis locorum legalium, a reworking by Georg Adam Brunner (Magdeburg, around 1555, Darmstadt 1610, Ingolstadt 1643 and Regensburg 1671).

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has digitized the editio princeps of 1516, the reprints Bologna 1528, Paris 1543 and Basel 1544. A second augmented edition appeared for the first time in Louvain in 1552, posthumously edited by sons of Everardi, and the reprints Lyon 1564, Venice 1567, Lyon 1579, Frankfurt 1581, 1591, 1604 and 1620, Cologne 1662. Thirteen digitized versions is more than I could have imagined!

Searching Nicolaus Everardi

Which books by Nicolaus Everardi do you find following the bibliographical strategy recommended by Klaus Graf? I will use also Graf’s general Leitfaden, his compact guide at the NetbibWiki. The Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog (KVK) is the first major tool to use. This meta-catalogue searches in library catalogues and collecitve catalogues worldwide and increasingly indicates digitized books. To show its range and depth I will take the example of the edition Paris 1543, the only result given by EMTO. When working on my thesis I had only found copies of this reprint in Munich, one at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the other one at the other side of the Ludwigstrasse in the university library of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The KVK shows copies of the 1543 reprint in Rostock, Halle, Dresden and Washington, D.C. in the Library of Congress. Somewhat surprising remains its absence in French collections. The German Wikisource has a fine list of digital collections. Searching in them will take more time, but is the obvious thing to do. To this German list I would add for completeness’ sake in the field of wiki’s the list of digital library projects on the English Wikipedia.

Let’s continue with the search tips of the Wikisource list. OAIster is since a few years integrated with WorldCat, an initiative to search in library catalogues worldwide. After having seen the results found by the KVK OAIster’s harvest is very minimal, just one book written by the Ingolstadt namesake of Nicolaus Everardi, and not surprisingly digitized at Munich. OAIster’s slogan “Finding the pearls” sounds a bit hollow to me. At this moment six of his works have been digitized. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine BASE does find only these six works at Munich, because only the documents in the Digitale Sammlungen are among the repositories harvested by BASE. Using the Europeana library portal brings you to twenty results. Only one Munich copy of an edition of the Synopsis by Brunner is noted here, the six works of the Ingolstadt Everardi are present, and nine results from Munich specifically for my Everardi. The university library at Ghent has digitized the reprint Lyon 1579, and the Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum the reprint Frankfurt 1604. Europeana finally shows bibliographical information for the reprint Bologna 1528, Venice 1539 and 1567 with images of the title pages made available for the census of Italian imprints of the sixteenth century.

The Wikisource list continues with a number of German tools. The BAM portal, a portal to German libraries, archives and museums, mentions almost 200 search results for Everardi, fourteen of them for Nicolaus Everardi, three for the Ingolstadt law professor and one for a Memoriale juridicum created by Georg Bucksulber from Everardi’s work. BAM finds the Consilia of the Ingolstadt Everardi (2 vol., Frankfurt 1603-1604), but not one digitized book for this test case. The list mentions ZEVEP which searchs in repositories and publishers’ catalogues, and the OPUS site at Stuttgart mainly presenting modern materials in digital repositories of German universities, with nothing for my example. EROMM, the European Register of Microforms and Digital Masters, does bring just one result for my case. The Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierter Drucke seems promising. It yields all digitized books in Munich of my example, but it succeeds in presenting as separate objects the parts of the alphabetical index in the edition Frankfurt 1604 held at Göttingen. I will not tediously list all German catalogues. One of the more interesting is the Okeanos server of the library centre for Nordrhein-Westfalen and Rheinland-Pfalz. This centre has also created Digibib which enables you to choose libraries anywhere in Germany, to use it as a meta-catalogue for all Germany, or to use links in its generous link selections. The HEBIS portal from Hessen is leaner than Digibib but brings less search results for my case. Intriguing and frustrating is the link to a digitized manuscript of Nicolaus Everardi Ingolstadtiensis at Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, HB VI 15, a persistent link unfortunately not – or not yet – correctly resolved. Searching directly at the website of the Stuttgart library did not bring me to this manuscript.

The overview at the German Wikisource has not forgotten other countries. In passing the TROVE website of the National Library of Australia is noted. The clear presentation of the different types of search results make it certainly look like a kind of treasure trove, but it brought me for this very specific case only a few useful results. The Pionier portal to Polish digital libraries is in principle the kind of tool which should bring results covering many or all digital libraries in one country, but alas without results for my Dutchman. Wikisource continues with a brief section on digitized manuscripts, scientific journals and newspapers. The low rate of digitization in Switzerland is lamented, but to E-rara one can at least add retro-seals for digitized journals, the mainly Francophone RERO DOC digital library of the West Swiss library association, and for manuscripts e-codices. Dana Sutton’s Philological Museum deserves well-earned praise for his efforts to create an analytical bibliography and to locate copies of digitized books with texts in Neo-Latin written after 1500. As for now only the Ingolstadt Everardi is to be found here. Elsewhere Graf almost groans about finding out about the holdings of digital libraries in Japan, but here progress is surely possible as shown at the “DigiMisc” page of the NetbibWiki.

Some conclusions

Perhaps the Everardi case is too much a case of a rare book, a rather paradoxical conclusion for a book reprinted so often during 150 years and even having its own offspring in the form of a Synopsis and a Memoriale, but some conclusions seem clear. Using the major collective catalogues and meta-catalogues is indeed the best point of depart. The KVK and its sisters for theology and religious history, the Virtueller Fachbibliothek Theologie und Kirche and the Kirchlicher Verbundkatalog, combined with Digibib and the BAM portal, give Germany a very dense coverage. Given the fact that Europeana exists only a few year it is no wonder its results can sometimes seem meagre. Wikisource did not mention the European Library, the consortium of Europe’s national libraries. The Wikisource page does offer a useful general approach to digitized books, and not just a handy list for checking bibliographical data. The NetbibWiki, an initiative of Klaus Graf, offers far more detailed pages on many aspects of libraries and digital collections, for example for incunabula. It helped me very much creating my own page on digital libraries with a focus on law and legal history.

To me the best practice seems to start using the major meta-catalogues, such as the KVK, Melvyl (California), the Belgian LIBIS network, URBS and maybe the Vatican Library as a class of its own, then to go to the large digital libraries and specific national digitization projects, and finally to use the collections assembled for the field of legal history, history and law. This is a world awaiting to be conquered, and surely searching digitized materials will still consume time. However, taking into account this triple approach means also you are following the path set out by Everardi who discussed among his forms of legal argumentation a enumeratione partium, “from counting the parts”.

A postscript

Klaus Graf points at his blog Archivalia to a list of French digital libraries at Bibliopedia. Karen Reeds points to the Internet Archive, only briefly mentioned in the list on Wikisource. It contains a growing number of books from American and Canadian libraries, and the search possibilities of the Internet Archive deserve close attention.

For old juridical books it is never too late to check the holdings of the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main and this institute’s catalogues of old editions created by Douglas Osler. National bibliographies, bibliographies of legal books – e.g. the Bibliography of Early American Law by Morris L. Cohen (6 vol., Buffalo, N.Y., 1998; supplement 2003) - and special bibliographies for old editions, some of them online such as the Short Title Catalogue Netherlands, the Short Title Catalogus Vlaanderen for Flanders, the German VD16, VD17 and VD 18 (with digitized copies), the English Short Title Catalogue, the Italian EDIT16 and the Catálogo Colectivo de Patrimonio Bibliográfico Español, should not be forgotten. Book History Online is a database of the Dutch Royal Library in which you can search for bibliographical literature.

What makes a book rare?

No doubt in 2011 rare books will show up in this blog. But what makes a book rare? I had no idea I would write about rare books in my first posting this year, and perhaps this fact helps to understand the word rare better. Instead of rare, meaning only seldom seen, known to be present at only a few locations, rare often has the added quality of being unlooked for. The departments of research libraries for Rare Books and Special Collections often combine this approach of bringing together manuscripts and books that have survived the centuries, editions of texts once common but now only found after extended research, and books and items brought into the possession of a scientific institution in a remarkable way. A scholar left his book collection, his research notes, lectures or papers to a university library, or a librarian succeeds at an auction in buying books on a particular theme. Sometimes a particular book was already a rarity at the time it left the press because of its contested contents or of its beautiful layout. It could have been printed on expensive paper or even parchment, and a priceless luxury binding increased its value, too.

You might have guessed that I somehow could not help spotting old books today, completely against the planning for new postings. I surfed to Belgica, the digital library of the Royal Library in Brussels. As an example of valuable editions now digitized the Royal Library presents in its showcase a volume with 43 juridical dissertations defended between 1652 and 1655 at the University of Franeker under the aegis of Johann Jacob Wissenbach (1607-1665). The accompanying note states these dissertations are not included in the Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN). The STCN aims at presenting data on Dutch imprints between 1540 and 1800 present in a generous selection of major Dutch libraries.

Which facts would enforce the conviction that these old juridical dissertations once defended at a university in Frisia are indeed rare and worth digitizing? The volume came originally from the library of the dukes of Arenberg and was confiscated after the First World War. This story accounts at least for the unexpected way this volume came into the possession of the Belgian Royal Library, but surely more can be done to estimate its rarity. One of the major projects for digitizing old dissertations is housed at the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte at Frankfurt am Main. To its holdings belong more than 70,000 juridical dissertations defended at universities within the borders of the former Holy Roman Empire. At Frankfurt 31 dissertations from Franeker have been digitized, and the dissertations at Brussels are not among them. This fact can rightfully form an indication that the 43 mid seventeenth-century dissertations are rare indeed.

I will not make this post any longer than necessary, and therefore I will just indicate which further steps need to be taken to ascertain more about the rarity of this volume. One step is to look at the holdings of libraries worldwide for particular dissertations within this set. Modern meta-catalogues are truly catalogi omnium catalogorum, foremost among them the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog. The KVK enables you to search in many catalogues – including collective catalogues – at the same time with just one search action; text search is one of the latest additions to the KVK. Neither the KVK nor a few other major collective catalogues mention these particular dissertations. The other way to tackle this question is the road of bibliographies. Ferenc Postma and Jacob van Sluis published for the Frysk Akademie a bibliography of publications from Franeker, Auditorium Academiae Franekerensis. Bibliographie der Reden, Disputationen und Gelegenheitsdruckwerke der Universität und des Athenäums in Franeker 1585 – 1843 (Leeuwarden 1995). Postma and Van Sluis did every effort to find disputations from Franeker wherever held. In my opinion one can state safely whether an old edition from Franeker is rare or not by referring to their bibliography. Tracking juridical dissertations and establishing their authorship is something for specialists indeed. On publications by lawyers from Franeker it is also useful to look at the Bibliografie van hoogleraren in de rechten aan de Franeker universiteit tot 1811 by Robert Feenstra, Theo Veen and Margreet Ahsmann (Amsterdam 2003).

Tresoar at Leeuwarden is the institution which combines the forces of the Frysk Riksarchyf and the Provincial Library of Frisia. For curiosity’s sake and because of the rich holdings housed at the former Treasury I checked for Johann Jakob Wissenbach in its catalogue. For Douvo Mellinga who held a disputation in 1654 contained in the set at Brussels a small volume survives with laudatory words by Wissenbach; to guess from the abbreviated title poems are concerned.

To round off for today, some books are certainly unlooked for! You will not expect Frisian books at Brussels. However, take for a random example a digitized book on Danish litterature at Tresoar in Leeuwarden, the edition Hafniae (Copenhagen) 1651 of [Runir] seu Danica literatura antiquissima by Ole Worm, is less surprising in view of the relatively small distance between Frisia and Denmark. I look forward to find more at the Belgica collection at Brussels, even if I have to inform you that the search function for this digital library does not work as expected. Using the normal catalogue and being alert for URL’s in the search results brings you to the digitized items, not just books, but also maps, music scores, drawings, engravings and medals.

A postscript

In this post I did not give a clear and succinct answer to the question whether the Brussels volume is rare indeed, but I can now safely vouch for its rarity. Checking for Douvo Mellinga in the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog led me to the Gemeinsamer Verbund Katalog which shows at the Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg a volume with two sets of disputations from Franeker, 43 in the first and 59 in the second, all presided by Johann Jakob Wissenbach, printed by Arcerius (Franeker 1658). In this volume the first disputation by Bartholomaeus Franck seems to be identical with the first disputation in the Brussels convoluted set, and the eleventh disputation in both sets is by Douvo Mellinga. It seems the Hamburg online catalogue shows old or incomplete bibliographical data, or more probable, one assumed the publisher of the second set to be also the publisher of the earlier “first” set. Cataloguing old juridical dissertations is a task for experts, and I do not want to offend any librarian. Ferenc Postma send me a comment stating he and Jacob van Sluis have found some 500 “new” titles for a supplement to their bibliography.

Universal and utopian

This year I have spent quite some time searching the internet both for information for my postings and for the pages of my website www.rechtshistorie.nl. At some turns I felt the clear temptation to use the main gateways to online information. In particular when dealing with digital libraries the presence of WorldCat, the Open Library and the World Digital Library seemed an invitation to refer people for once and forever to these endeavours which aim so much wider and higher than my efforts. However, when I tried to use these websites most times I returned empty-handed. With only 1350 items the World Digital Library still has many empty shelves, even if one has to applaud the fact that all continents and major regions of the world are represented. Many months ago a notice by archivist Eric Hennekam on his Dutch archive forum made me smile about such heroic efforts. It makes one aware of the many obstacles faced by the pioneers behind these projects with a claim to completeness or worldwide coverage, and of the fact that the 21st century is not the first century to witness similar proposals. Through the centuries lawyers, too, have left their footprints on this trail.

The Mundaneum

Hennekam pointed to the history of the Mundaneum at Mons, about which institution The New Yorker had published in June 2008 an article by Alex Wright, “The Web Time Forgot“. The Internet Archive has stored the documentary All Knowledge of the World (Alle kennis van de wereld) by the Dutch VPRO television from 1998 about the creator of the Mundaneum, Paul Otlet (1868-1944). Wright tells the story with more skill than I have at my disposal, so I will only give a summary. Otlet was a Belgian bibliographer who created the Universal Decimal Classification. He worked together with the Belgian politician and pacifist Henri la Fontaine (1854-1943) who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1913 for his Bureau International de la Paix. La Fontaine teached international law at the Université Libre at Bruxelles. In 1895 Otlet and La Fontaine founded the “Institut International de Bibliographie”. Otlet did not only devise a new classification system, but used it at his institute and envisaged powering it with a mechanical system to link information. Many million library records survive and eventually the project became too vast. In 1934 Otlet published his major bibliographical work, the Traité de documentation in which he presented his vision of reading library books at home using a kind of telescope. The card collection was housed at several addresses before the remains arrived at Mons after the Second World War. Today the Mundaneum offers shelter to archives on feminism, pacifism and anarchism.

Were Otlet and Fontaine the first people to create such projects? The nickname of an early multivolume collection of juridical treatises, the series called Primum [-Decimum] volumen tractatuum doctorum iuris published in Lyon in 1535 was “Oceanus iuris”, “The Ocean of Law”. At Jena the Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbiblothek prepares a digital edition of this edition in ten volumes from its “Historische Bestände“. The Bibliotheca Universalis (1545) of Konrad Gessner – online at the Universitat de Valencia – can claim to be the first early modern attempt at universal bibliography. More early editions books of works by this Swiss scholar have been digitized for E-Rara. The Lyon 1549 edition of the Tractatus Universi Iuris counts seventeen volumes, and the better known version printed between 1584 and 1586 at Venice has 27 volumes with four volumes for the indices. Gaetano Colli has used his book about this edition of the Tractatus Universi Iuris to create an online database to assist the search for treatises by particular authors or on special subjects in this collection.

Other early lawyers tried to create comprehensive surveys of all fields of law. Giovanni Nevizzano published a Index librorum omnium qui in vtroque iure hinc inde eduntur (Venice 1525), a generation later superseded by Giovanni Baptista Ziletti and his Index librorum omnium nomina complectens, in utroque iure tam pontificio quam caesareo (Venice 1559), better known as the Index librorum omnium iuris tam pontificii quam caesarei (Venice 1566), an edition digitized at the Göttingen Digitalisierungszentrum. Among their successors are for instance Agostino Fontana with his Amphitheatrum legale (4 volumes, Parma 1688-1694; reprint Turin 1961) and Martinus Lipenius with the Bibliotheca realis iuridica first published in 1679. The Leipzig 1757 edition – online at Polib, the digital library of the universities of Lille - has been reprinted in 1970. The 1775 and 1789 supplements are online at the Hathi Trust Digital Library. It should not surprise you that I have not yet found a digital version of all works mentioned here. Please do not hesitate to share your knowledge if you know more!

A most remarkable digitization project is to be found at the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence for the multi volume manuscript called Mare Magnum, a universal bibliography created at the beginning of the eighteenth century by Francesco Marucelli. This manuscript was never printed, but can now be consulted online. In the last century John Gilissen and a team of legal historians working with him edited a bibliographical project with a less ambitious title, Introduction bibliographique à l’histoire du droit et à l’ethnologie juridique (6 vol. in 8 parts, Bruxelles 1963-1988).

I would like to finish this posting by bringing you to a digital library at the Université de Poitiers called Les premiers socialismes, a new project with both modern studies on the first French socialists such as Fourier and Saint-Simon and works by them. Socialist utopism was an important current in the nineteenth century. The links selection on this site could bring you to the Familistère de Guise, a housing and factory project near St. Quentin, on its website characterized as a realized utopia.

Clearly some people will keep trying to realize utopian projects. Modern technology certainly offers some of the means to create also virtual utopias. The internet realizes to a large extent even more than visionaries like Jules Verne could dream of or describe. These days it is clear that bringing digital information on an unprecedented worldwide scale is not just the dream of scholars or journalists, but a major fact in private lives and public life. Politics and law are touched by it and try to influence it. A legal history of Internet is not a fancy book title anymore.

A postscript

On March 17, 2011, Mike Widener, curator of the Rare Book Room of the Lilian Goldman Law Library of Yale University, wrote a blog post showing the frontispiece of the Jena 1743 edition of Burkhard Gotthelf von Struve’s Bibliotheca iuris selecta, another legal bibliography. Of Struve’s work several reprints and enlarged editions exist. Many works by Struve have been digitized in Halle, Dresden and Munich. Using the OPAC Plus catalogue at Munich you can now find seven (!) digitized editions of Struve’s Bibliotheca iuris selecta, Jena 1703, 1710, 1714, 1720, 1725, 1743 and finally the 1756 edition.