Jacques Cujas and legal humanism

Portrait of Jacques Cujas – anonymous painting, 17th century – Musée du Vieux Toulouse, Inv 22.5.1 – image Wikimedia Commons

Tracing the influence of famous lawyers is not a straightforward thing. Some scholars were already famous during their life, others exerted a lasting influence through their pupils or by their published works, sometimes only decades after their death. Reputation can be an obstacle to critical assessment of achievements. The recent publication of a monograph about Jacques Cujas (1522-1590) helps to create a new focus on Cujacius and his importance as a lawyer, professor and legal humanist. On March 28-29, 2022 a conference will be held at Paris with a telling title, Jacques Cujas 1522-2022. La fabrique d’un “grand juriste”. In this post I will look at the congress program and look at some aspects of Cujas’ life and work as foundations for his influence, first in France and later in other European countries and beyond Europe.

The importance of biography

Xavier Prévost (Université Bordaux) is responsible for bringing Cujas into the limelight again in this century. After his voluminous thesis Jacques Cujas (1522-1590), Le droit à l’épreuve de l’humanisme, defended in 2012 in Paris, he published Jacques Cujas (1522-1590), Jurisconsulte humaniste (Genève 2015) and a shorter work Jacques Cujas (1522-1590) (Paris 2018) as a part of the series Histoire litttéraire de la France.

A quick search for more information sheds light on the scale of the commemoration of Cujas’ five-hundredth birthday. The platform France Mémoire has created an online dossier for the 2022 activities around Cujas. The Bibliothèque Cujas, the central law library of the Université de Paris, will launch on March 28 a virtual exhibition about Cujas, a most welcome thing. Obviously the link to the online exhibit does not yet function. The physical exhibition at this library well be on display until June 24, 2022. Prévost will hold a lecture in Paris on the theme “La (seconde) Renaissance du droit romain” on March 17, 2022.

The program (PDF) of the conference on March 28-29, 2022, shows a most sensible approach in several layers which also can be helpful to view other legal humanists in Early Modern Europe in different settings. The local approach contains papers looking at some places where Cujas was active, Turin in the paper by Valerio Gigliotti (Turin) and Toulouse in the paper by Florent Garnier (Toulouse). The section on patrimoine (heritage) has the arts and literature as its subject. Jacqueline Lalouette (Lille) will discuss sculptures of Cujas, and Valérie Hayaert (Warwick) will speak about Cujas and the arts. Literature is the theme in the contribution of Stéphan Geonget (Tours). In the international section the reception of Cujas in Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain and the Dutch Republic will be discussed, with papers by Diego Quaglioni (Trento), John Carins (Edinburgh), Rafael Ramis Barceló, (Universitat de las Illes Balears), and Laurens Winkel (emeritus, Rotterdam). The final section on historiography looks at the representation of Cujas in general history, for example in biographical dictionaries during the Ancien Régime, and of course within the field of legal history, Anne Rousselet-Pimont (Paris) will speak about the place of Cujas in the works of the French arrêtistes. Pierre Bonin (Paris) will discuss dictionaries. Géraldine Cazals (Bordeaux) and Anne-Sophie Chambost (Lyon) will confront the theme of Cujas’ authority, in partciual after the French Revolution.

A very active life

The sheer number of themes at this two-day conference in itself is already interesting. What made Cujas so special among French lawyers? Let’s look quickly at the main points of Cujas’ life. Either in 1520 or 1522 he saw the light of life in Toulouse, He studied law in his home town. After teaching in Toulouse from 1547 to 1554 he did not become a professor in Toulouse, and this started a career which brought him to a number of French cities: Cahors (1554), Bourges (1555-1556, 1559-1565, and 1575-1590), Valence (1557-1559 and 1567-1575). In 1575 he taught briefly in Paris, and outside France he lectured in Turin (1566). In Bourges you can visit the Hôtel Cujas, home since 1875 to the Musée de Berry. The variety of cities and his long stay at Bourges pinpoint the fact that he was not just a great successor to Andrea Alciato who had also taught at Bourges, making it into virtually the main French city for legal humanism.

When you start searching for Early Modern printed editions of his works, for example within the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC, St. Andrews) the very first – and quite rare – work called Catalogus legum antiquarum (…) (Paris 1555; USTC no. 154264) has a title showing already the different path he was to follow. A focus on order is clearly visible. Cujas devoted much time to reconstructing the original works of Roman lawyers such as Ulpian. Cujas did not just study the Justinian Digest, Code and the institutes. He published one of the earliest critical editions of the Codicis Theodosiani libri XVI (Lyon 1566; USTC no. 158074). Writing a commentary on the Libri Feudorum was not the next thing you would expect. Among the earliest edition of his De feudis libri V is an edition Heidelberg 1567 (USTC no. 629710). He commented also the Justinian Novellae (first published as Novellarum constitutionum impp. Justiniani expositio (Cologne 1569; USTC no. 678571). Thus Cujas studied the Corpus Iuris Civilis in its full width, but he studied also earlier and later sources for Roman law. He did not bring the first edition of the Basilica, but he certainly drew attention to this importance source of Byzantine law with his Latin translation [Basilikon liber LX (…) (Lyon 1566; USTC no. 154652).

With Cujas you see not just a professor with only interest in Roman law in its original form. Like many other Early Modern law professors he wrote legal consultations and published them, too [Consultationum liber singularis (Cologne 1577; USTC no. 664682)]. However, characteristically he opened his collection with an edition of the Consultatio veteris cuiusdam iurisconsulti, the very editio princeps of this text. I will not mention here any other titles of his works, apart from his Observationes et emendationes, a modest title taken from other humanists expanded in every edition. All in all the USTC gives references to some 180 editions of Cujas’ works, most of them published after his death in 1590. Of course this is just an impression of Cujas’ printed legacy: The USTC stops at 1650, and searching in for example the Heritage of the Printed Book database (CERL) will show you re-editions of his works until the mid-eighteenth century. For Cujas at least four Opera omnia editions exist. It is good to note that Ernst Spangenberg devoted many pages of his study Jacob Cujas und seine Zeitgenossen (Leipzig 1822) to a detailed bibliographical overview of Cujas’ published works.

Cujas taught scholars who became famous in their own right, too. Jacques-Auguste De Thou, Josephus Justus Scaliger, Jacques Labitte, Antoine Loysel, Pierre Daniel, Pierre Pithou and Étienne Pasquier are just some of them. Through Pierre Daniel some of Cujas’ manuscripts came in the hands of Jacques Bongars (1554-1612) whose large library eventually arrived at the Burgerbibliothek in Bern. You might jump to the conclusion all these men occupied themselves mainly with either law or Classical Antiquity, but for example Antoine Loysel (1536-1617) studied in particular French customary law. Étienne Pasquier (1529-1615) was a poet, but also a member of the royal Chambre des comptes.

Influence beyond borders

A Dutch and even Utrecht connection with Cujacius is mentioned by the indefatigable Danish historian Jen Jensen Dodt van Flensburg (1800-1847) who devoted so much energy in unlocking sources for the history of Utrecht. In his article ‘Doctoraal diploma, door Jac. Cujacius in 1586 verleend aan Everard van de Poll, Utrechtenaar’, Bijdragen tot regtsgeleerdheid en wetgeving 5 (1830) 67-69 – online at Delpher – he gives the text of the doctoral degree conferred by Cujas in Bourges to Van de Poll (died 1602). later on the advocate of the States of Utrecht, a benefactor of the city Utrecht with his workhouse and the posthumous gift of his library to the city library, eventually part of the collections of Utrecht University Library. Interestingly this text also mentions Bernardinus de Monte Valdone (died 1618), a student from The Hague, who later on served as the advocaet-fiscael of the Hof van Utrecht, the provincial tribunal. Dodt wrote more about Cujas in another article for the Bijdragen tot regtsgeleerdheid en wetgeving 6 (1831-1832) 1-33.

In Cujas we see a scholar aiming not only to find out about the original order of Roman law, but also preparing new approaches to contemporary law by reinvigorating the study of Roman law, and inspiring numerous students to follow the paths of both law and history as twin subjects. Cujas was able to inspire his own students and later generations with his wide knowledge and deep insights. No wonder he defies easy labeling, and this invites scholars since four centuries to look at his achievements and legacy from many perspectives. The sixteenth century saw in France a galaxy of legal humanists, each of them with distinct qualities taking part of the emerging Republic of Letters, and influencing much else, too, in politics, government and the development of law and justice in their age. Studying legal humanists helps you to rethink approaches of legal history for our time, too.

Finding Frisia’s culture and legal history

Since many years the European Union gives every year two cities the title European Cultural Capital. Cities compete with elaborate bid-books to get this coveted title. In 2018 La Valletta, the capital of Malta, and Leeuwarden, the main city of the Dutch province Friesland (Frisia), share the honours. In this post I will look at Frisian culture and history. However varied the program of events, i would like to look at more enduring institutions and projects which bring Frisian culture and history to you. Legal history has its own place in this context.

A matter of languages, and much more

The most striking element of the portal Leeuwarden 2018 is the absence of Frisian as a language to view this commercial website. You can choose between Dutch, Frisian, English and German at another portal, Leeuwarden-Fryslân – European Capital of Culture 2018. Here, too, you will find a calendar of events, but their cultural dimensions are given more prominence. Among the cultural events the parade of three giants in Leeuwarden made a great visual impact. Events took place in many Frisian towns and villages, ranging from opera to a heroic solo swimming tour along eleven towns to raise money for the treatment of cancer. Building the community, mienskip, was a central theme.

Frisia’s legal history

It would be almost easy to foucs here on either medieval Frisian law, with remarkable texts such as the Lex Frisionum, late medieval regulations on water management or the Roman-Frisian law during the period of the Dutch Republic, Frisia’s own version of the Roman-Dutch law. Tresoar provides us also with an overview of sources at Alle Friezen (All Frisians), available in Frisian, Dutch and English. The links section of Tresoar is most useful, You might want to look at other Frisian archives as well, easily found using the Fries Archiefnet. However, I have chosen an other subject within Frisia’s long legal history.

Amidst all events for Leeuwarden 2018 you could easily miss the opening on October 19, 2018 of the exhibition at Tresoar, the Frisian archive and library in Leeuwarden, around a Frisian lawyer, and the uncovering of a statue in his honor by Herman van Rompuy.  Wigle van Aytta van Zuichem (1507-1577) latinized his first name to Viglius. He was born at the Barrahuis estate (stins) in Wirdum near Leeuwarden. His uncle Bernard Bucho was a councillor of the Hof van Holland in The Hague and saw to Viglius’ education. As many students from the Low Countries Viglius started his studies in Leuven (Louvain) where he arrived in 1522, but a few years later he went further abroad. In 1526 he was at the university of Dôle. In 1529 he received his doctoral degree in Valence. He continued his travels to Bourges to become a student and assistant of Andrea Alciato. Soon his career started. In 1532 and 1533 he taught the Institutiones Iustiniani in Padua, in 1534 he became the official (ecclesiastical judge) for the bishop of Münster, in 1535 and 1536 he was at the Reichskammergericht in Speyer before teaching law at Ingolstadt between 1537 and 1541.

Painting of Viglius van Aytta as chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece, 1564, by Jacob de Punder (1527-around 1570) – Leeuwarden, Fries Museum

His political career started at an amazingly high level in 1540 when he became a member of the Conseil Secret (Geheime Raad, Secret Council), one of the most important institutions in the Habsburgian Low Countries. In 1549 he became its president, first until 1569, and again from 1573 to 1575. Meanwhile he had joined in 1543 also the Groote Raad van Mechelen (Great Council of Malines), a very important high court for the Low Countries. He conducted the negotiations for Charles V for the Burgundian Treaty of 1548 which led to a more coherent status of the Low Countries in relation to the Holy Roman Empire. In 1554 he became the president of the Raad van State, the state council. At the abdication of Charles V in 1555 he wanted to step down from his functions, but king Philip II convinced him to stay with for example the promise to become abbot of the rich St. Bavon Abbey at Ghent. Viglius’ wife Jacqueline Damant had died in 1553,. In 1562 he had been ordained to the priesthood by Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, the trusted councillor of Philipp II and at the height of his powers as recently appointed archbishop of Malines. By now it will not surprise you Viglius presided since 1563 as chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece. I could have chosen a more sober portrait of him painted by Frans Pourbus the Elder, now in the Louvre, but the painting at the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden is most telling.

Legal historians can encounter him as a legal humanist. In 1534 Viglius published the editio princeps of the Greek paraphrase by Theophilus of the Institutes (Institouta Theophilou antikēnsōros) [Institutionum iuris civilis in Gracam linguam per Theophilum antecessorem olim traductae (…) (Basel: in officina Frobeniana, 1534: online, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)], followed by a Latin translation in 1536. Also in 1534 appeared his lectures on the Institutes held in Padua, Commentaria Viglii Zuichemii Phrysii in decem titulos Institutionum (…), published in Basel by Froben (online, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek). When you check the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC; University of St. Andrews) for early editions of works by Viglius you will find a notice about an edition Lyon 1533 held at Montauban, but the database of Lyon15-16. Bibliographie des éditions lyonnaises 1473-1600 makes clear this is probably an edition printed at Lyon in 1564. Only posthumously appeared a series of lectures held at Ingolstadt, Praelectiones in titulum pandectarum, de rebus creditis, et ad titulum codicis Justinianaei, de edicto divi Hadriani tollendo (Cologne: Gervinus Calenius and heirs of Johann Quentel, 1582; online, Universiteit Gent).

The USTC shows a number of pamphlets from 1543 by Viglius from the years on political matters. His Confutatio defensionis ducis Clivensis super jure ducatus Geldriae ac comitatus Zutphaniae (…) (Antwerp 1543), reprinted the same year as Serenissimae reginae Mariae contra ducem Clivensem justificatio also appeared in Dutch, De onschult der coninginnen vrou Marie regeerster der Erf Nederlanden tegen den hertoge van Cleve (…) (Antwerp 1543). Mary of Hungary, governor of the Low Countries, asked Viglius to act as her ambassador at Nuremberg and to speak up against the aggressive policies of duke William of Cleve who claimed the territory of the duchy Guelders (Gelre).

Finding out about Viglius

There is a considerable body of literature about Viglius life and works. The two volumes of the biography by Folkert Postma stand out, Viglius van Aytta als humanist en diplomaat 1507-1549, (Zutphen 1983) and Viglius van Aytta. De jaren met Granvelle 1549-1564 (Zutphen 2000). Not all of Viglius’ writings were published in the sixteenth century. At the multilingual portal site Dutch Revolt only the Dutch version has a section with numerous biographies, the one for Viglius mentions a number of relevant titles. The long article on Viglius by Postma in the Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek is available online, too, but alas this, too, is in Dutch [NBW VIII (1979), col. 837-855]. The Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences has created a bio-bibliographical lexicon of Dutch humanists between 1500 and 1700, but this resource, too, is only accessible in Dutch, as is the one for Viglius by Toon van Houdt. He notes for example an earlier pamphlet by Viglius dealing with the Cleve-Guelders controversy, Assertio ivris imperatoris Caroli hvivs nominis Quinti, in Geldrię ducatu, & Zutphaniæ comitatu (…) (Antwerp 1541; online, Universiteit Gent). Some works have received attentions only in the last decades. Regina Sprenger wrote about Viglius’ notes about his work as a judge (Assessor) at the Reichskammergericht, Viglius van Aytta und seine Notizen über Beratungen am Reichkammergericht (1535-1537) (Nijmegen 1988). This Protokollbuch is kept at Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, ms. Van der Gheyn, nos. 2837 to 2840. Paul Nève and Regina Sprenger have published together articles about his time in Speyer. Joost Pikkemaat has studied the lectures held at Ingolstadt [Viglius van Aytta als hoogleraar te Ingolstadt (Nijmegen 2009)]. Earlier he wrote for example about Viglius’ inaugural lecture at Ingoldstad [‘De inaugurale rede van Viglius van Aytta aan de universiteit van Ingolstadt’, in: Van oud en nieuw recht : handelingen van het XVde Belgisch-Nederlands rechtshistorisch congres, Dirk Heirbaut and Daniël Lambrecht (eds.) (Ghent 1998) 53-65]. There is a brief biographical article in English on Viglius by Michael Erbe in Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, P.G. Bietenholz and T.B. Deutscher (eds.) (3 vol., Toronto 1985-1987; reprint 2003) III, 393-395, where Viglius’ position in the network around Erasmus is concisely charted.

Viglius is remarkable also for his historical work and an autobiography. He collected maps and he acted as the first librarian of the royal library in Brussels. A number of his letters, too, were published. You can consult four original letters sent to Viglius in the image library of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The Kalliope guide for manuscripts and personal papers in Germany alerts to some letters and to 23 volumes at Göttingen, and to a volume with letters in Giessen. In Paris the BnF has among its archives et manuscrits a volume of the Manuscripta Zwichemiana (Nouv. acq. fr. 6168) and some letters from king Philip (Mélanges Colbert 409, VII, no. 817). If you search for Viglius at the Dutch archives portal you will find in particular in Leeuwarden and Utrecht archival records. When you use the Archives Portal Europe you will find even more. At Mémoire vive, the digital portal of the city Besançon you can find materials concerning Viglius within the Collection Granvelle. For those with access to the licensed Picarta resources, for instance via the Dutch Royal Library, you will find more letters in the Nederlandse Centrale Catalogus, and you will wonder why only two letters are listed in another Picarta resource, the Catalogus epistularum neerlandicarum, a database for finding Early Modern letters in a number of Dutch public collections. The two volumes of Postma will help you to trace even more.

It is entirely fitting a former president of the European Commission was asked to uncover the statue of Viglius at Leeuwarden. His published works were often reprinted during his life and some of them even afterwards. His letters and manuscripts ended in major libraries after periods in the hands of many scholars and collectors who appreciated Viglius’ contacts with celebrated humanists. Important archival records can be found in Brussels, Vienna and Simancas. Viglius’ life shows eminently how a an able man seemingly from a far-away corner of Europe could come close to the very nexus rerum of his time. Although he clearly felt much at home in Ghent he never forgot his Frisian roots. In this sense Leeuwarden can indeed claim to be a European capital. Once upon a time studies about Viglius were colored by nationalism and religious positions. If we see him now more as a true European with strong ties to his origin, this might teach us a lesson for our century. At some turns legal historians might have deplored his early goodbye to legal humanism, but it is more sensible to respect his efforts to steer clear of many problems in the middle of Europe’s political turmoil of his time which led to revolt and civil war in the Low Countries and many other parts of Europe.

Guillaume Budé, a (legal) humanist

How did the interest in the history of Roman law start in Early Modern Europe? In the Middle Ages scholars who got access to the famous Codex Florentinus, a sixth-century manuscript with the text of Justinian’s Digest, for centuries hold at Pisa, did notice the Greek elements. We call the scholars who started to study Classical Antiquity and literature in its full depth and width humanists. The Renaissance in Italy spread quickly to other parts of Europe. In France Guillaume Budé (1468-1540) quickly became one of the foremost humanists. From May 3 to 5, 2018 an international congress will be held in Paris with the glorious title Les Noces de Philologie et de Guillaume Budé. L’œuvre de Guillaume Budé au prisme du savoir humaniste cinq siècles et demi après sa naissance. How did philology and Budé come together? In this post I will look at this upcoming scholarly event, and at Budé and his heritage.

A versatile scholar

The sections of the congress in May 2018 will look at different themes. The first section focuses on Budé’s mastery of Greek and his contributions as a Hellenist. In the second section scholars will discuss how Budé read not only works by Classical authors, but also by his contemporaries. Legal humanism and politics are the central theme of the third section. Budé as an author and especially the creator of dictionaries comes into focus in the following section. The fifth section is devoted to a single book, De asse, the model monograph of Budé about Roman coins and much more. A section concerning the reception of his works and Budé’s afterlife and reputation will close the congress.

In the section on legal humanism scholars will tackle various subjects and questions. Patrick Arabeyre will discuss to what extent more traditional lawyers in the first half of the sixteenth century were influenced by legal humanists and their books in their own works. In a way this is a paper about the importance of the mos gallicus, the nickname for the new approach to law associated with French humanists. It is good to keep in mind that some Italian lawyers, in particular Andrea Alciato, taught also in France. The Annotationes in XXIV libros Pandectarum and the traces of Budé’s developing views are the subject of a paper by Jean Céard. Decades ago Douglas Osler already fulminated against those scholars who without any reflection took any nearby copy of this work as their only source, see his articles ‘Budeaus and Roman law’, Ius Commune 13 (1985) 195-212, and ‘Turning the title page’, Rechtshistorisches Journal 6 (1987) 173-182. Michel-Dominique Couzinet will look at philosophy and history in the Institution d’un prince, his only work in French. Guillaume Budé and Thomas More’s Utopia are the theme of a paper by Michel Magnien. This section just happens to be the only one with exclusively French speakers.

Portrait of Guillaume Budé by Jean Clouet (died 1540) – painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York – image Wikimedia Commons

A quick look at Budé – or Budaeus, the latinized form of his name – learns you that he was indeed a towering figure. He translated Plutarch from the Greek. His Commentarii linguae Graecae led the foundation for Estienne’s Thesaurus linguae Graecae, the first major Greek dictionary. Budé was a secretary of king Louis XII, and was later close to François I for whom he created a library at Fontainebleau with a collection of Greek manuscripts that would later become the core of the modern Bibliothèque nationale de France. In 1530 he was one of the founders of the Collège de France, first named Collège Royal. As a royal officer Budé was chosen in 1522 to serve a year as prevôt des marchands in Paris, a function in which he had to deal with commerce in Paris and the powerful Parisian merchants. His study of Roman coinage in De Asse was not only a vehicle for showing his skills as a scholar of ancient numismatics, but in this work he wanted to gain and show insight in Roman culture and society. A French summarized translation appeared in 1523 [Sommaire ou epitome du livre de asse (Paris: Galliot du Pré, 1522 (=1523))]. Budé would not have been a true humanist without an extensive correspondence with other humanists from Étienne Dolet and François Rabelais to Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More.

Budé’s reputation and reception

A society active in France for the promotion of editions and translations of Classical texts has the appropriate name Association Guillaume Budé. You can find its journal, the Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé, online at the Persée portal, from its start in 1923 up to 2015. The Institute d’Histoire et Recherche des Texts (IRHT) in Paris and Orléans has created a database concerning the transmission of ancient and medieval texts with an acronym, Base Unique de Documentation Encyclopédique, BUDE, which you can access after registration. It is astonishing Budé figures with only two editions of his works, but luckily two 1543 editions of the Annotationes are among the books digitized in Les Bibliothèques Virtuelles des Humanistes (Université de Tours), a project which figured here in 2013.

Speaking of digital libraries, the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC, University of St. Andrews) will show more than 300 titles of works and editions by Budé. Increasingly the USTC contains links to digitized versions of sixteenth and seventeenth-century books. In the database BP16: Bibliographie des éditions parisiennes du 16e siècle of the BnF, based on the bibliographical work of Philippe Renouard and Brigitte Moreau, Budé figures with 65 works printed in Paris in the sixteenth century, i.e. editions, single publication and works of authors with whom he was associated. Humanists often wrote prologues, poems and recommendations which authors included in their publications.

As for Budé and his work on the Justinian Digest I would not dare to say here anything without first at least mentioning the last study of the late Hans Erich Troje, “Crisis digestorum”. Studien zur historia pandectarum (Frankfurt am Main 2011). Troje died on October 11, 2017. Since his 1971 book Graeca leguntur Troje patiently studied the way humanist scholars looked at the sources of Roman law. The ways the Digest was viewed and studied developed in an intricate interplay of preparations for new editions of the text in the Codex Florentinus, a most complex manuscript, and reading and valuing both published editions and commentaries by leading humanists. Access to the venerable manuscript in Florence and to Angelo Poliziano’s notes about it proved crucial. A few years ago I was happy to summarize here the excellent introduction to the Pandette manuscript and its history by Davide Baldi who shows you nicely the difficulties facing you when you want approach and understand this precious manuscript.

It would go beyond the scope of this post to look systematically at recent publications about Budé, but I cannot resist mentioning here an edition of some of his letters in La correspondance de Guillaume Budé et Juan Luis Vives, Gilbert Tournoy (ed.) (Leuven 2015). Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie and Luigi-Alberto Sanchi published a volume with articles under the title Guillaume Budé, philosophe de la culture (Paris 2010). The title and contents show nicely the many ways one can view Budé and the high esteem he still enjoys. The Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé is a sure port of call to find new studies, notes about sources and reviews of recent publications. In many cases you will Budé encounter anyway when you study the spread of humanism and its very particular offspring, legal humanism. His broad interests, the depth of his learning and the size of his network are probably too daunting for scholars to embark on a full biography of this remarkable figure. If anyone nowadays is able to take up this challenge you will soon think of Anthony Grafton. He showed more than a passing interest for Budé in his study Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997). After his books on Scaliger and Casaubon Budé would seem an obvious choice for a sequel. Hopefully the conference in Paris will bring new and interesting views, and perhaps the spur for a much needed monograph on Budaeus.

On studying the Theodosian Code

It is a good tradition to start here every year with a post about Roman law. Sometimes a new resource deserves attention, but this year I want to look at a text, the Theodosian Code, because it will be at the heart of a three-week course at Pavia with the title The Theodosian Code: Complilation, Transmission, Reception. The week is hosted by the center CEDANT (Centro di studi e ricerche sui Diritti Antichi) from January 8 to 26, 2018 at the Collegio Ghislieri. The course will be led by Detlev Liebs (Universität Freiburg) and Dario Mantovani (Università degli Studi di Pavia). In particular the partial tradition of the Codex Theodosianus has been the subject of investigation. Only a part of its text has survived the centuries in its original form, and a critical tradition arrived only belatedly. The edition in 1905 by Theodor Mommsen and Paul Meyer did not solve all riddles. The participants of the course in Pavia have the chance to hear about the latest developments in scholarly research from the very scholars who delve into this work of legislation from Late Antiquity. In this post I propose to create a kind of nutshell guide to the current state of knowledge.

New knowledge about an old text

Modern research does of course not lose sight of the critical edition published by Mommsen and Meyer, Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis et leges novellae ad Theodosianum pertinentes (2 vol., Berlin 1905), but we tend to look in this century first to its availability online. Only its first volume in the Internet Archive is everywhere accessible online without having to use a U.S proxy. Perhaps you want to start 2018 with finally using this and similar tools. Klaus Graf explained a few days ago again concisely how to start using a proxy for Hathi Trust. For quick reference one can turn to the digitized version with only the text at The Latin Library. We will see to which source the cross references in this online edition point. Another quick way to the text is provided by the invaluable Amanuensis app of Peter Riedlberger and Günther Rosenbaum, introduced here in 2015. You can run his program also on your computer. There is no excuse nowadays for not giving references to the main text of Roman law. Clyde Pharr’s The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions: A Translation with Commentary, Glossary, and Bibliography (Princeton, NJ, 1952) provides you with a helpful translation in English of this code which assembled acts of Roman legislation between 311 and 437 AD.

Paul Krüger (1840-1926) could only publish an edition of the books I-VIII of the Codex Theodosianus (2 vol., Berlin 1923-1926). He would surely have pursued this path, but he died before he could achieve this. In an earlier post I looked at his legacy, in particular at his papers hold at the Library of Congress. Krüger had worked together with Mommsen on a complete edition of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, but Mommsen decided to finish his own edition of the Codex Theodosianus without even mentioning Krüger on the title page of the edition.

Having access to a text is one thing, approaching it in the right way is another. Probably the best way to start is to go to the version in the Roman Law Library created by Yves Lassard and Aleksandr Koptiev at the Université Grenoble-Alpes. Here the Constitutiones Sirmondianae and other texts are clearly distinguished from the main body of the Theodosian Code. The code came into force in 438 AD. Lassard and Koptiev give in separate sections the text of the Gesta Senatus Romani de Theodosiano publicando and the Leges novellae ad Theodosianum pertinentes. They also guide you to the digital version created at Lille of the Leipzig 1736-1745 edition of the version published by Jacques Godefroy (1587-1652). They point in their digital library correctly to a digitized version in the Internet Archive of the second volume of the Mommsen-Meyer editions with the Theodosian Novellae.

As a student I was intrigued by the title of the Constitutiones Sirmondianae. Jacques Sirmond (1559-1651) was a French Jesuit who published editions of many early medieval ecclesiastical authors. His fame for later generations rests upon his editio princeps in Appendix Codicis Theodosiani novis constitutionibus cumulatior (…) (Paris: Cramoisy, 1631, online, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome) of a number of missing constitutions in the editions that had appeared until his time. Of course the fame of this edition is a relative thing: you will see that only the German Wikipedia article for Sirmond mentions it.

Centuries of scholarship

With Godefroy and Sirmond we entered the field of legal humanism and erudite scholarship, and we have to note another thing that somehow is not always clear. The textual tradition of the sources of Roman law rests only for a small part on inscriptions and papyri from Classical Antiquity. Medieval manuscripts and Early Modern editions are very important. Earlier scholars might have seen manuscripts that no longer exist or are mutilated. Sometimes manuscripts were simply destroyed after the printer had finished an edition.

Late Antiquity is the perspective of the Projet Volterra at University College London, named in honour of Edoardo Volterra (1904-1984), with the Law and Empire AD 193-455 (“Project Volterra I”) database which helps you to search efficiently for laws concerning particular subjects or from a particular emperor. The section Early Medieval Texts is a fair attempt to create a nutshell portal for early medieval legal history, and the parallel section Resources for Roman law is perhaps even better, with for example a section for online journals and an overview of online contents of other journals. You might want to look also at the website Roman Empire of Simon Corcoran, one of the main scholars in Projet Volterra. Sadly the link to the Projet Volterra version of books 1 to 8 of the Theodosian Code does not work currently.

It should not be a complete surprise to find ample information about both the Codex Theodosianus and the Constitutiones Sirmondianae also at the website of a project concerning early medieval law, the Bibliotheca legum: Eine Handschriftendatenbank zum weltlichen Recht in Frankreich led by Karl Ubl (Universität Köln). The project website can be consulted in German and English. In the Bibliotheca legum Ubl and his team give concise introductions to a number of early medieval laws, in particular the so-called Völkerrechte (“Law of Peoples”). The first part of the Theodosian Code (books I-V) has been transmitted to us only in the Lex Visigothorum Romana, sometimes called the Breviarium Alaricianum – hence the reference to Brev. in the version of The Latin Library – and its abbreviated versions, with pride of place for the Epitome Aegidii, first edited in 1517 by Pieter Gillis. You can read more about this Flemish scholar in a post I wrote in 2016 around him and Thomas More’s Utopia. By now it is clear that dealing with the Theodosian Code means entering a constellation of related texts. The Bibliotheca legum leads you to existing editions of texts, to a current bibliography and to the manuscripts containing a particular text. Both for the older editions and the manuscripts you can often go to a digitized version. Ubl points to seventeen manuscripts for the Theodosian Code and ten manuscripts for the Constitutiones Sirmondianae. For the Lex Visigothorum Romana and its abbreviated forms 105 manuscripts are mentioned, and you will find even articles published in 2016 and 2017.

Studying the Codex Theodosianus is an international affair. Among the studies after 2000 Ubl mentions for example John F. Matthews, Laying down the law: a study of the Theodosian Code (New Haven, CT, 2000), A.J.B. Sirks, The Theodosian Code. A Study (Studia Amstelodamensia 39; Friedrichsdorf 2007) and the late José María Coma Fort, Codex Theodosianus. Historia de un texto (Madrid 2014), a study which you can download as a PDF. There is an updated version (2017) of the very useful article by Detlev Liebs, “Codex Theodosianus”, in: Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte 1 (2nd ed., 2008) col. 868-870) in the scholarly repository of the Universität Freiburg.

In this post I focused on the transmission and reception of the Codex Theodosianus. During the seminar at Pavia there will be attention also for the redaction of this code of law, with due attention to inscriptions and papyri, too. Boudewijn Sirks and Simon Corcoran will be among the scholars who will teach at Pavia a public of talented and hopefully most attentive students and graduate students about the latest findings and views concerning one of the great attempts in Late Antiquity to bring as much Roman laws together as humanly possible. As for myself, I learned at the very least a few things that needed to be added or corrected to the Roman law page of my legal history website Rechtshistorie. More importantly, I was most happy to see how a line of research starting with Johann Sichard, Jacques Godefroy and Jacques Sirmond through Gustav Haenel and Carlo Baudi di Vesme to Mommsen and Krüger is clearly kicking and alive in this century. Seeing the continuity, the disputes and new starts is a good thing!

Between printed books and social media

On this blog digitization is often shown at its best when digital initiatives bring you closer to sources and texts which used to be difficult to access. Even though blogs themselves belong to the social media I have seldom commented here on their use or abuse in the field of legal history. Museum Meermanno in The Hague is host to an exhibition in cooperation with institutions in Göttingen, Antwerp and Hasselt to show books and other printed media from a period when printing itself could be dubbed the agent of change. Conn3ct: Impact van drukpers en sociale media has got “media” as the extension of its web address. With Erasmus (1469-1536) on the start page browsing a smart phone the message of this exhibition website becomes more personal. His presence reinforces the theme of the exhibition with communication and its manifestations in the sixteenth century as its heart. Erasmus’ role and position in the international scholarly community as a prince of letters and literature is indeed hardly conceivable without the printing press and public exchanges of views on many subjects. Interestingly, there is attention to law and justice, too, in this exhibition. The website can be viewed in Dutch, English and German.

The exhibition currently on display in The Hague has been created by the Vlaamse Erfgoedbibliotheek [Flemish Heritage Library] in Antwerp and the Dutch Royal Library (The Hague) in cooperation with the Provinciale Bibliotheek Limburg in Hasselt and the Universiteit Antwerpen. The Dutch-Flemish presentation at the Frankfurter Buchmesse in 2016 was the occasion to organize the exhibit first shown in Göttingen thanks to the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen.

Similar and different

The core of the Conn3ct website is the theme section with nine themes concerning communication and action. “Enter”, “Start” and “Change” are seemingly straightforward. With “Status”, “Follow” and “Control” you enter clearly the empire of the social media, and “Delete” “Community” and “Chat” follow naturally. Here I will look rather at random at some of these themes. “Change” brings a comparison between the early days of book printing, with books without a title page, and sixteenth-century books with title pages. Many features of the virtual world we now take for granted have come gradually within the first twenty-five years of the virtual world. Under “Control” you will find items concerning censorship, but also its counterpart, pirated editions and edition with a fictive printing address and origin. It is a useful reminder that not only ecclesiastical authorities acted against books when you see here for example an ordinance of emperor Charles V forbidding books [Mandament der Keyserlijcker Maiesteit. Met dintitulatie vanden gereprobeerde boecken (Leuven: Servaes van Sassen, 1546)], a decade before the first papal Index librorum prohibitorum. The virtual delete button brings you to subjects as printed ephemera, very rare editions and early bibliographies, even one created in 1523 by Erasmus of his own works, on one side, and notions such as anonymous internet surfing and the questions of virtual longevity.

The second main section, Books and videos at the Conn3ct website is more traditional. It offers a searchable overview of the books, videos and other media, just over one hundred items. You can choose at will among themes, media, technical aspects such as illustrations, general characteristics, for example bestsellers, de luxe-editions or corrected versions, language, year of publication, and contributing institution. I would almost forget you can connect any item quickly to actual social media or store them in your favorites. It is worth looking also at the section with ideas for digital initiatives of Dutch and Flemish schools for the arts.

It is easy to point to similarities between the sixteenth and the twenty-first century, but this exhibition show also the differences. In my view the juxtaposition of two periods helps to perceive the precise impact of the variety of forms of communications in print versus the proliferation of social media creating either a virtual reality or increasingly a normal part of the world. In a cartoon the two ducks Fokke and Sukke commented like medieval monks in their version of the Canon of Dutch History (2007) on the printing press: “This invention will not stay with us. People will always want to read handwritten books!”

The oldest museum for the history of the book

The Museum Meermanno at the Prinsessegracht, The Hague – image source: Monumentenzorg Den Haag

Two collections form the heart of the Museum Meermanno, in the twentieth century known under a longer name, Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum. Johan Meerman (1753-1815) had studied law in Leipzig, Göttingen and Leiden and became a politician, serving for example as a mayor of Rotterdam. His father, Gerard Meerman (1721-1772), pensionaris (city secretary) of Rotterdam, was also a lawyer. He had already started collecting books about law and jurisprudence which led to the publication of the Novus thesaurus juris civilis et canonici (7 vol., The Hague 1751-1753; online, Hathi Trust Digital Library). Gerard Meerman edited also the Epitome Gai in a very rare edition [Specimen animadversationum criticarum in Caii Jcti Institutiones (…) (Lutetiae Parisiorum: apud Merigot, 1747)] which I mentioned last year in a post about Pieter Gillis and Thomas More’s Utopia. Meerman’s edition was reprinted in the Novus thesaurus. Later on he started also collecting manuscripts and incunabula, books printed in the fifteenth century. In 1764 he bought for example the manuscript collection of the Jesuit college Louis le Grand. Gerard Meerman’s research into book history led to his study Origines typographicae (2 vol., The Hague 1765; online, Hathi Trust).

A nephew of Johan, Willem van Westreenen van Tiellandt (1783-1848), too, was an avid collector of books, coins and Egyptian artefacts. During the French period he served as an adjunct-archivist of the Kingdom Holland. In the new Kingdom of the Netherlands he became in 1815 the treasurer of the new Hoge Raad van Adel (High Council of Nobility) and in 1842 director of the Royal Library. He bought substantial parts of the Meerman collections at an auction in 1824, and in his will he bequeathed his collections and house to the Dutch nation. The location of the Museum Meermanno, close to the Royal Library, explains the easy cooperation between both institutions. Some of the most renown Dutch librarians served at both locations. The modern museum collects especially bibliophile and rare editions.

The world of law and justice is by all means not only a place of the spoken word, but also a world of words in print or in online databases and digital collections. It is only fitting that two lawyers created book collections which are still the central features of a remarkable museum. The exhibition is certainly worth your virtual visit, and it should be a good reason to visit The Hague, too.

The Hague, Museum Meermanno: Conn3ct, impact van drukpers en sociale media – February 24-May 21, 2017 – from June 22 at Antwerp and from October 14 in Hasselt

500 years Utopia

Portrait of Pieter Gillis by Quentin Matsys – Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica – source: Wikimedia Commons

This year I have succeeded so far in avoiding centenary celebrations, but some of them are definitely interesting from the perspective of legal historians. In 1516 Erasmus published his edition of the Greek text of the New Testament, the Novum Testamentum graece, with for us a remarkable title, Novum Instrumentum (…) (Basel: Johann Froben, 1516; VD16 B 4196; online for example at the Swiss portal e-Rara). Even with all its shortcoming this edition proved to be a starting point for many developments in scholarship and theology. Legal historians might prefer to leave the onset of the Reformation to church historians and theologians, but they will certainly not want to forget another book published in 1516, Thomas More’s Utopia (Louvain: Dirk Martens, 1516; more bibliographic details in the Short Title Catalogue Vlaanderen).

The flood of literature about More, his book and his circle make it almost impossible to look at it without preconceived opinions and views. Is it possible to say something new, something worth reading at all within the compass of a blog post? However you may think about this state of affairs, I would like to present one of the main figures appearing in More’s Utopia. Pieter Gillis was a humanist scholar who merits attention for his work in the field of legal history, in particular with his edition of a source for the history of Roman law, yet another book printed by Martens in Louvain. In fact, it is seldom noted at all Gillis was a trained lawyer, and thus certainly prepared for his tasks as the city registrar of Antwerp. He is not the only lawyer you will encounter here.

First editions from Louvain

Why should authors in the early sixteenth century turn to Dirk (Thierry) Martens (1446-1534) for the publication of their books? The Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek has a fine article on him (vol. VI, col. 633-637). Martens printed his first book already in 1473 in his native city Aalst. He was among the earliest printers of the Low Countries. His first publication – published together with Johann of Paderborn – was a religious work, the Speculum conversionis peccatorum of Dionysius Cartusianus (Denis of Ryckel), a book digitized in the Flemish digital library Flandrica (GW 8420). From 1492 onwards Martens had his firm in Antwerp and since 1512 in Louvain, the only university town of the Low Countries. In 1491 he used for the first time in the Low Countries Greek type fonts. Printing the works students needed provided him with a stable market. Martens is even credited with promoting the use of the Roman type font. He was definitely a printer with some remarkable feats on his record.

Pieter Gillis (latinized Petrus Aegidius) (1486-1533) initially studied law at Orléans (1501). However, soon he became active as a corrector for the printing firm of Dirk Martens. Already in 1503 or 1504 he met Desiderius Erasmus, one of the authors coming to Antwerp to have his books published by Martens. In 1504 Gillis registered as a student at the university of Louvain, and in 1509 Gillis became the city registrar of Antwerp. In 1512 he got the degree of a licentiatus in law from the university of Orléans. Dealing with Gillis is indeed entering also the book trade of his time, one of the reasons I supply for the book titles in this post at least some bibliographical references. The NBW has a good biographical article on Gillis by M. Nauwelaerts (vol. I (1970), col. 4-7). A much older article in German by A. Rivier for the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie can also be consulted online (ADB I (1875) 125-126).

The road to More’s Utopia

Ambrosius Holbein’s illustration with the protagonists of More’s Utopia – edition Basel 1518, p. 25; copy Yale University, Beinecke Library

Before going to More’s Utopia I must acknowledge here the great assistance offered in writing this post by the very useful and extensive International Thomas More Bibliography of Romuald Lakowski. The story of how More came to write Utopia scarcely needs retelling. As a diplomatic envoy he met Pieter Gillis in 1515. The two men became friends, and one of the fruits of their meeting was More’s book. In the prologue of Utopia More tells about his encounters with Gillis and Raphael Hythlodaeus, the stranger recently arrived from Brazil whose stories are the very heart of his book. When preparing this post I wondered where people would have found the famous images taken from the first edition of Utopia, the image of the island and the Utopian alphabet. Surely this last feature came into existence thanks to the suggestions and expertise of both Gillis and Martens. Lakowski provided me with the link to a digital version of the first edition of Utopia at a library where you probably will not expect a copy, the Gleeson Library of the Geschke Center at the University of San Francisco. The digital books in this library cannot be found using regular online search tools such as the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog and the Universal Short Title Catalogue (University of St. Andrews). Other early editions such as the one published in Paris by Gilles de Gourmont in 1517 (Gallica) and the famous edition by Froben (Basel 1518) can readily be found in various libraries, the latter for example in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

The Latin text of More’s Utopia can be searched in several ways. You will find just the text in The Latin Library, and a colourful version at the Bibliotheca Augustana of Ulrich Harsch, based on the version created at the Oxford Text Archive. For a linguistic approach you can benefit from the search functions offered in the version at IntraText. At first I would have preferred to leave translations out, and thus honour the principle ad fontes so dear to sixteenth-century humanists, but having a translation within your reach is most helpful. The first translation of More’s Utopia was the work of a legal humanist, Claude Chansonnette (Claudius Cantiuncula). Interestingly Cantiuncula (around 1493-1560) had been at Louvain before going to Basle where he published his translation Von der wunderbarlichen Innsel Utopia genannt das andere Buch (…) (Basel: Bebelius, 1524; digitized at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich). Cantiuncula decided to translate only the second part of More’s book, not the first half. At this point it is most welcome to point to the bibliographical survey of people connected to Desiderius Erasmus, Contemporaries of Erasmus. A biographical register of the Renaissance and Reformation, [CE] P.G. Bietenholz and T.B. Deutscher (eds.) (3 vol., Toronto-Buffalo-London 1985-1987; reprint 2003). This work contains entries for Pieter Gillis (CE II, 99-101), Dirk Martens (CE I, 394-396) and Claude Chansonnette (CE I, 259-261), and of course for Thomas More (CE II, 456-459).

Among the modern German translations of Utopia the version of historian Gerhard Ritter (1898-1967) is still being reprinted. Ritter made his translation early in his career (1922). You can see in a post from last year my photograph of several pocket law books accompanied by the modern incarnation of Ritter’s translation which gives you also the Latin text.

A meeting of lawyers

The title page of Pieter Gillis’ edition of the Epitome Aegidii – Louvain: Martens, 1517 – copy Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

The excellent website of Lakowski with its most useful bibliographies for many subjects concerning Thomas More and his Utopia taught me looking at legal matters around Thomas More is not something new. In this post I will just look at a few aspects. Let’s go back to Pieter Gillis who published in 1517 a number of sources in the field of Roman law. Dirk Martens printed his Summae sive argumenta legum diversorum imperatorum… Caii et Iulii Pauli Sententiis (USTC 403069; digital copy at the Digitale Sammlungen, Munich). The Latin title of his book is certainly long, but it does clearly indicate the constituing parts edited by Gillis. His work contains the editio princeps of the Epitome Aegidii, a shortened version of the Breviarium Alaricianum/Lex Romana Visigothorum, in itself a reworking of the Codex Theodosianus. The manuscript he used contained also a shortened version of Gaius’ Institutiones (Epitome Gai) and the Sententiae Pauli. Among the rare Early Modern editions of these texts is a very rare book by the famous Dutch book collector Gerard Meerman, Specimen animadversationum criticarum in Caii Jcti Institutiones (…) (Lutetiae Parisiorum: apud Merigot, 1747).

The story of Pieter Gillis’ edition is intriguing. What manuscript did he use? Surprisingly Marcel Nauwelaerts wrote in his article for Contemporaries of Erasmus about Gillis’ edition “of which is a manuscript is preserved in the library of the University of Leiden (MS BPL 191 ba)” (CE II, 101). Is there truly a manuscript once owned or written by Petrus Aegidius? Many manuscript catalogues at Leiden can be consulted online in its Digital Special Collections. The manuscript Leiden, UL, BPL 191 BA can even be viewed online. The catalogue entry by P.C. Molhuysen makes it very clear this manuscript belonged to Paul Petau who wrote a brief summary of the content on the flyleaf. It seems Nauwelaerts was too eager to find a manuscript connected with Gillis. The manuscript has also been described within the online project Medieval Manuscripts in Dutch Collections, but here, too, things are not completely straightforward. Searching for the Epitome Aegidii yields only the manuscript Leiden, UL, VLQ [Vossiani Latini in quarto] 119. When searching directly for BPL 191 BA you find it with as its title Epitome legis Romanae Visigothorum, which is in itself not wrong, but not complete either.

Finding out more about the Epitome Aegidii

A few years ago Karl Ubl (Universität Köln) started the Bibliotheca legum, a project dealing with early medieval law in France. The project deals with many texts and a multitude of manuscripts, including those with Roman law texts and the early medieval law codes conveniently known as the Völkerrechte, “laws of the nations”, because they were addressed to the populations of certain territories. The Breviarium Alaricianum, also known as the Lex Romana Visigothorum, is among them. The Epitome Aegidii, too, figures in this project, currently with thirty manuscripts. Here it becomes clear the Dutch manuscript portal should also refer to Leiden, UL, BPL 114, also consultable online. When you search for “Epitome edited by Aegidius” you will find it together with BPL 191 BA, but without Voss. lat. qu. 119. The Manuscripta juridica database at Frankfurt am Main uses the term “Lex Romana Visigothorum (“Breviarium Alarici”) (Epitome Aegidii)” and offers 25 manuscripts.

The Epitome Aegidii is also among the many subjects in the opus magnum of the late José Maria Coma Fort. His book Codex Theodosianus: historia de un texto (Madrid 2014) is available online in the digital repository of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (PDF; 3,8 MB). Last year Faustino Martinez Martinez reviewed this book most approvingly for the online journal Forum Historiae Iuris. Here I can scarcely do justice to the efforts of José Coma Fort. He mentions Gillis at several turns and discusses his edition in detail at p. 371-375. He concluded the manuscript Gillis used is probably no longer extant. Coma Fort brings into relief the way Gillis’ edition was almost unknown until Meerman’s reimpression, and he looks in particular at the discussions concerning the Epitome Aegidii of humanist scholars such as Bonifacius Amerbach, Johannes Sichard and Johannes Cujacius. Did they willingly ignore the editio princeps? Even today it can be considered a rare book. One of the earliest general bibliographies, Konrad Gessner’s famous Bibliotheca universalis (Tiguri [Zürich]: Froschauer 1545; online at e-Rara) has an entry for Petrus Aegidius without his legal work (p. 543). The USTC has references to eleven copies. Using the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog I could add copies at Lausanne, Vienna (ÖNB, online) and Heidelberg. The Vatican Library, too, has a copy. The tenacity of Wouter Nijhoff and especially M.E. Kronenberg in creating together the Nederlandsche bibliographie van 1500 tot 1540 (‘s-Gravenhage 1923-1971) comes only sharper into view for current scholars with so many resources within easy reach online. In their bibliography NK 15 is the entry for Pieter Gillis’ book, and NK 1550 deals with Martens’ edition of More’s Utopia.

Dirk Martens of Aalst printed at Louvain in 1516 yet another editio princeps, the first edition of the book on legal argumentation by a Dutch lawyer, Nicolaus Everardi (around 1462-1532), his Topicorum seu de locis legalibus liber, a work I studied for my Ph.D. thesis. In 2011 I presented here a post about the digital versions of several sixteenth-century editions of this book, incidentally one of my most often read posts. It is only fitting to revisit in the 200th post of my blog Louvain in 1516. At the end of this post I realize how I like to bring things together in one post. Hopefully you will not mind the way I led you here to such important resources as the Bibliotheca legum and José Maria Coma Fort’s great book on the transmission of the Codex Theodosianus!

A postscript

University College London organizes on June 30 and July 1, 2016 the graduate conference Imagined Worlds in the History of Political Thought, an event also in coniunction with the quincentenary of Thomas More’s Utopia. You can send a proposal for papers before April 15, 2016, by mail to conference@historyofpoliticalthought.net.

In this post I could have mentioned the English online traduction available at The Open Utopia, but the focus here was clearly on the Latin original.

Images, words and the law

However seducing texts are as sources to gain new knowledge, images do rightfully claim our attention, too, nay stronger, they are even more seducing and intoxicating than texts. Legal iconography is the auxiliary science to history and law which studies the uses and abuses of imagery in law and justice. A few months ago I was attracted to a building with both images and texts in an intriguing combination. Very close to it is a statue of a man who has been responsible as few others before him for introducing images as an educational tool. Here I would like to share with you a few thoughts about this building and about the role of images in teaching and research.

The town hall at Naarden

This summer I visited the town of Naarden, some twenty kilometers to the south-east of Amsterdam. Jacob van Deventer’s map of Naarden, part of the cartographic project for the Spanish king Philip II, shows a town with medieval city walls, no match for the modern weapons of the sixteenth century. During the Dutch Revolt Spanish armed forces attacked Naarden in 1572 with brutal force. The soldiers murdered the inhabitants and destroyed the city almost completely. The Grote of St. Vituskerk with its famous painted wooden vaults survived. Afterwards Naarden became a fortified town, even an archetype of the Dutch fortification system, as you can see when visiting the Vestingmuseum.

Among the buildings rebuilt in Naarden after 1572 is the town hall in Dutch Renaissance style, completed in 1601, almost thirty years after the tragic events. Whatever form the medieval town hall might have had, its new incarnation still looks splendid. On the facade not just blazons and statues all convey their particular visual message, Three texts have been added to bring yet another message.

On closer inspection two of these texts are really two versions of the same message. The Latin text to the left has been superbly condensed into Early Modern Dutch. The Latin reads: Quidquid erit superanda / omnis fortuna ferendo est, “whatever the event may be, every turn of fortune has to be subdued by bearing it”, a quote from Vergil’s Aeneid (V,710). Surprisingly the Dutch is much more condensed, but succeeds in adding also a significant twist: Ist lyden ist vreucht / Draeght soo’t God vuegt, “be it suffering or joy, bear it when God brings it”. Here classical Antiquity is invoked at the service of the civil authorities, but at the same time subtly christianised.

The pious overtones are much clearer in the inscription below the tympanum above the entrance, Godt regiert al anno 1601, “God governs everything, in the year 1601”. The tympanum is crowned by allegorical statues representing Faith, Hope and Justice, the latter in the middle portrayed in the familiar way of a blindfolded woman with a balance and a sword. On the top of the left part of the facade is an allegorical statue of Love, the right part is crowned by the Dutch lion. The blazons below the first floor windows are those of the county of Holland (a lion rampant), of prince Maurice of Oranje, and West-Friesland. In the tympanum you can see the blazon of the Habsburg emperors, the Austrian Doppeladler, the double eagle, which is also the blazon of the city of Naarden.

Emblems: combining images and text

Combining texts and images is of course not something new, but in a way it is here at least a bit unexpected. At first the brief Latin proverb and its wonderful crisp and concise Dutch rendering led me to speculate about a very particular influence. Justus Lipsius (1547-1606), the great Flemish political theoretician who taught some years at Leiden was also known as an editor of Tacitus. He influenced Pieter Cornelisz. Hooft (1581-1647), a prolific author and for forty years bailiff of Muiden Castle near Naarden. He wrote his Nederlandsche Historiën, a history of the Low Countries in difficult prose, clearly modelled on Tacitus’ works. Hooft published in 1611 Emblemata amatoria, a volume of emblems, symbolic images with a motto and didactic verses. However, we must rule out this argument as a possible source of influence for the decoration of the town hall in Naarden, simply because Hooft was much too young in 1601 to exercise any influence. I was genuinely surprised, too, to find Vergil as the author of the quote, not Tacitus. Instead one could perhaps better look at the early works of Hugo de Groot (1583-1645). A search for possible direct influences at Naarden can be quite long. A quick search for Dutch literature citing Vergil’s words in the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (DBNL) brought me to Jacob Andriesz. Boelens (1554-1621), a burgomaster of Amsterdam often active on special missions in the early seventeenth century whose motto was Superanda omnis fortuna ferendo. It is a tantalizing hint which needs further corroboration.

The literary genre of emblematic literature was launched by one of the most famous humanist lawyers, Andrea Alciato (1592-1550) with his volume Emblemata (first edition Augsburg: Steyner, 1531). In 1529 he had already published Selecta epigrammata Graeca Latine versa (..) (Basel: Bebel, 1529; online in Göttingen). It is intriguing to look for an emblem which might have influenced the choice of a text at Naarden. Access to early editions of emblem books is much helped by four major online projects, at Glasgow for Italian and French books, at Utrecht for Dutch books, mainly from the seventeenth century, the project Emblematica Online of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Herzog-August-Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, and the Biblioteca Digital de Emblemática Hispánica of the Universidade da Coruña.

Et toleranda homini tristis fortuna ferendo est, Et nimium felix saepe timenda fuit. Sustine (Epictetus dicebat) et abstine. Oportet Multa pati, illicitis absque tenere manus. Sic ducis imperium vinctus fert poplite taurus In dextro: sic se continet a gravidis.

The online collections at Glasgow has a separate section for Alciato. The first line Et toleranda homini tristis fortuna ferendo est of an emblem appearing in the section Fortitudo of Alciato’s collection comes closest to the quote from Vergil. In the edition Venice 1546 you will find this as no. 34, the emblem Anechou kai apechou / Sustine et abstine, at fol. 29v. In later editions this emblem has either no number or it appears with a different number, and thus it is really necessary to indicate exactly which edition you happen to use. For our emblem you would find it for example in the Paris 1550 edition on page 41. The image shows a farmer who keeps bulls away from cows. The Glasgow project has a useful list of the mottos and their occurrences in the main editions of Alciato’s text, and the Alciato website by William Barker is also most helpful in tracking emblems, mottos and verses; you can even find an English version of this emblem. However, this is only a possible indirect source or inspiration behind the choice for a verse with an admittedly more pointed and direct meaning, The emblems in the section Fortuna might be the first spur for searching a text, in particular the emblem Semper praesto esse infortunia.

Teaching by images

Why do I refer here at length to Alciato’s work and the role of images in connection with the town hall in Naarden? Across the street with the town hall of Naarden is the Grote or St. Vituskerk, and between the church and the town hall is a statue commemorating the Czech theologian, philosopher and pedagogue Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670). From 1656 onwards he had found a refuge at Amsterdam. Comenius had contacts in Naarden, and he was buried in a church at Naarden. The Comeniusmuseum keeps his memory alive. Among his works are books such as the Ianua linguarum reserata [The open entrance of languages] (1631) which developed a new model for teaching Latin and other languages, and the Didactica magna (1633-1638), his opus magnum with a new comprehensive view of children’s education. The possible connection between Comenius and legal iconography is offered in particular by his Orbis sensualium pictus [The world of senses in images] (1658), the first book recommending and exemplifying the systematic educational use of images. In this work he uses for example pictures to help children learning the alphabet. In the space of this posting I can at least point you to the Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung in Berlin. Its digital library contains among other things early illustrations from pedagogical works.

More than a century before Comenius Alciato and others had introduced first a learned public and later also a wider public to a very successful combination of images and texts. The taste for this genre was at least sometimes mirrored by architecture. Alciato brought to the new emblematic literature his own legal background which made it a potential useful resource for anyone looking for outspoken combinations of images, concise proverbial sayings and often exquisite poetry. Somehow the presence of this literary genre makes it far more conceivable that lines from classical poetry can embellish buildings. As for which specific emblems collection provided Dutch people the clue for their choice I suppose you will need to look at many different collections, not just the Latin collections, but also those in Dutch and French, and even collections published in Spain.

Promises of more…

Sofar we have only looked at the facade of the town hall in Naarden. It would be really interesting to look also inside the town hall at the interior where you can find for example two seventeenth-century paintings in the city court room. I am sure you cannot separate them completely from the intriguing facade. The digital portal Memory of the Netherlands offers you a very quick entrance to images of both inside and outside the stadhuis at Naarden. Some photographs are already a bit older and reflect to some extent earlier scholarly approaches. For further research you will no doubt benefit from the resources at the municipal and regional archives in the Gooi- en Vechtstreek, located in Naarden and Hilversum.

This week I saw the 2013 online exhibition The Nomos of Images. Manifestations of the law in picture atlases and photo archives created by the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. Some images in this virtual exhibition come from the Sammlung Karl Frölich at the Max-Plank-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main, a collection with photographs taken between 1930 and 1950 which eventually will be digitized. In my view it can be most helpful to use both older resources and new materials to help research in the field of legal iconography. This post gives only some indications of directions you might choose for further investigations, but hopefully it helps you to get a taste of them.

A postscript

At the blog Interfaces/Livres anciens de l’Université de Lyon appeared on November 24, 2014 a very interesting contribution about Comenius, ‘Comenius, un pédagogue de l’avant-garde’. This year the digitization of the Sammlung Karl Frölich has been completed. In 2015 I have published a post about this collection.

The galaxy of French legal humanism

Is it old-fashioned to focus on the lives of individual lawyers or is it old school thinking to focus on them as a group? A nice synthesis worthy of Hegel would try to bring the study of a particular profession and biographical studies together within a new framework. Anyone studying the great and small legal humanists of the sixteenth century has to face the fact that the subjects of their research walked both the legal roads of this period and the paths of humanist scholarship. They focused on many aspects of history with a predilection for Classical Antiquity, its languages and sources. French lawyers were very visible in this field. In this post I would like to look at some online resources in France and elsewhere which help fostering the study of their works, lives, activities and surroundings.

Many places, many names

Some scholarly projects have helped enormously to become aware of the sheer number of people involved with legal humanism. At the very heart of humanism were manifold contacts, often by letter, which crossed the borders of countries and languages. Letters in impeccable Latin following the models of Antiquity served not only as means of communication, but also as shining fruits of the mind. Perhaps the ultimate accolade was writing to and receiving an answer from Erasmus. He and his correspondents were fully aware that their letters were bound to be copied and made public. In a sense remarkably close to the sharing of information on the web in our time the republic of letters of the sixteenth century was a very open society, too. P.S. Allen’s edition of Erasmus’ letters [Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami (12 vol., Oxford 1906-1958; reprint Oxford 1992)] was and is the single most influential project to stimulate research on Erasmus and his contemporaries. Since a couple of years Allen’s edition and the old Opera omnia editions of Erasmus’ works are being digitized at Erasmus Online. The volumes of the modern Opera omnia have been already digitized, and can be downloaded as PDF’s at OAPEN. Translations in English and Dutch are among the modern projects to make them even more accessible. At the website of the Warburg Institute you can find a fine overview of the major projects for the edition of letters by humanist scholars, including online inventories and editions, and a useful bibliography. The volumes of the biographical dictionary Contemporaries of Erasmus. A bibliographical register of the Renaissance and Reformation, Thomas Deutscher and Peter Bietenholz (eds.) (3 vol. Toronto 1985) help to survey this intricate web of contacts by letters and other writings.

Looking at French humanist lawyers

However interesting in itself, letters form here the stepping stone to law. Letters and humanists are the very heart of the project in the center of this contribution, Les Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes (BVH), the Virtual Humanistic Libraries, a project hosted by the Université de Tours. The multiple form bibliothèques draws attention to the presence of materials from several libraries in the Loire region, mainly those at Blois, Bourges, Châteauroux, Tours and Orléans. At the heart is the project Epistemon which started in 1998 for editing and searching humanist texts, in particular letters. The BVH now is home also to texts by humanist scholars, both in digital version and only as text, notarial acts from Tours and manuscripts. An accompanying blog keeps you informed about the latest developments. The section on iconography helps you find images with Iconclass, including some portraits of authors.

In the project MONLOE of the BVH copies of the early editions of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, Montaigne’s own annotated copy of this work and other books, letters and manuscripts with his notes are being digitized. In May 2013 Ingrid de Smedt (University of Warwick) detected in the Herzog-August-Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel a manuscript (Cod. Guelf. 7. 1. Aug. 4to; digitized at Wolfenbüttel) with notes made in 1561 of lectures by François Baudouin (1520-1573) on Roman law and on the title page an owner inscription by Montaigne (1533-1592) (“Michael Montanus”). This manuscript was in fact the first to be tracked down as undoubtedly stemming from the personal library of Montaigne. Montaigne was between 1556 and 1570 a councillor in the Parlement de Bordeaux, one of the mighty provincial courts in Ancien Régime France. The BVH cooperates with the ARTFL project at the University of Chicago, where you will find also a searchable database of the first editions of Montaigne’s Essais, including the famous annotated copy of the edition Bordeaux 1588. Many texts in the BVH can be interrogated with Chicago’s Philologic tool. The University of Chicago maintains a website for Montaigne studies, with apart from digitized early editions a number of current bibliographies.

The blog of the BVH is hosted by the French platform Hypotheses. In fact an announcement at another blog on Hypotheses, Francofil, made me look again at the BVH. A second reason to delve into French digital libraries was the change of address of the digital library of the university of Strasbourg, now named Numistral, and the launch of Numelyo at Lyon. A quick search at Numelyo in its section Provenance des livres anciens brought me to a copy of Sueton’s Lives of the Caesars (Venice: Zani, 1500) (Rés. Inc. 1114) with an inscription that might also be by Montaigne.

Law is not absent at the website of the BVH. I found with the advanced search form for digitized copies with the domaine “droit” 54 books. Among them you will find for example Louis Charendas le Caron, Pandectes ou digeste de droit françois (…) (Lyon: Veyrat, 1597), editions of coutumes, customary law, commentaries on Roman and French law by authors such as Jean de Coras, Jean Imbert, Jean Papon and Pierre Rebuffi. One of the most often printed works is present, too, the Annotationes in Pandectas of Guillaume Budé (1467-1540), in an edition Paris 1543. Nobody should use these editions of Budé’s magnum opus without reading first the articles by Douglas Osler, ‘Budeaus and Roman law’, Ius Commune 13 (1985) 195-212, and ‘Turning the title page’, Rechtshistorisches Journal 6 (1987) 173-182. Budé changed consecutive editions of this work substantially. It would be rash to rely on just one (digitized) edition which you happen to find. Guillaume Budé’s name is used as an acronym, BUDE, for the online searchable database documenting the transmission of classical and medieval authors in manuscripts from the fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes in Paris and Orléans.

Another famous French humanist, Jean Bodin (1529-1596), is the subject of The Bodin Project, a very useful portal at the University of Hull. Bodin studied Roman law at Toulouse and worked ten years as an attorney at the Parlement de Paris. On this portal you will find links to digitized versions of contemporary editions of Bodin’s major works, bibliographies and links to other relevant projects. Particular mention should be made of the source indexes for some of Bodin’s works. Digitized versions of three sixteenth-century editions of Bodin’s works, too, are present at the BVH.

One of the reasons I wanted to look more closely at the BVH project was in fact a misreading. I thought I had seen an announcement on this website about the digitization of a treatise on money valuation by Jacques Cujas (Cuiacius) (1522-1590). Cujas studied law in Toulouse, taught there and more famously at Bourges. It turned out to be a text by Jacques Colas, Suputation nouvellement faicte de la valeur de monnais et des abuz dicelles, a manuscript from 1557 (Orléans, Bibliothèque municipale, Fonds ancien, ms. 629). Cujas is actually absent on the shelves of the BVH. Now Bodin was one of the authors in the sixteenth century writing about monetary issues. He is credited with an early exposition of the quantative theory of money in his 1568 treatise Réponse au paradoxe de M. de Malestroict touchant l’enchérissement de toutes choses, et le moyen d’y remédier. The website at Hull points to a digital version of the Bibliographie critique des éditions anciennes de Jean Bodin by Roland Crahay, Marie-Thérèse Isaac and Marie-Thérèse Lenger (Brussels 1992), where you can quickly find detailed information about the editions and existing copies of this text and other works by Bodin. In the case of the Réponse your attention will be drawn also to translations in Latin and German. The Latin version first appeared in a collection of monetary tracts and consilia (legal consultations) with the title De monetis et re numaria edited by Reinier Budelius (Coloniae Aggripinae: Gymnicus, 1591; digitized at the University of Ghent). Among the other texts in this volume are two consilia on cases which centered around monetary devaluation by Nicolaus Everardi (around 1462-1532), a Dutch lawyer who became famous for his Topica sive de locis legalibus liber, a work on juridical argumentation. Everardi’s texts can be found at pages 689 to 701 of Budelius’ edition. Chris ten Raa published a study on Consilium nr. 105 van Nicolaas Everaerts (Rotterdam 1978). No version of Bodin’s monetary treatise is present at the BVH or at The Bodin Project.

I have looked for digital projects concerning other French sixteenth-century legal humanists such as Hugues Doneau (Donellus, 1527-1591), François Hotman (Hotomannus, 1524-1590), François Douaren (Duarenus 1509-1559), Denys Godefroy (Gothofredus, 1549-1622) and Jacques de Thou (Thuanus, 1553-1617), but until now I found only for François du Jon (Franciscus Junius, 1545-1602) a digital project, The Junius Institute at the Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, MI.

On using the Universal Short Title Catalogue

Musing over the issue of digital versions I realized that a search for the works of French sixteen-century lawyers would make an excellent test case for the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC), a project hosted at the University of St. Andrews with French books printed until 1600 as its original core. In October 2013 a new version of the USTC website was launched. The project is an ambitious companion to other short-title catalogues such as the ISTC for incunables, the ESTC for English books (1473-1800), the STCN for the Netherlands (1501-1800) and STCV, its Flemish counterpart. The bibliographical information for the works of Bodin makes a fine example. For this project copies of French books have been inspected and described at many libraries. Supplementary information from other bibliographical works is summarily indicated. For the monetary treatise its existence in print thanks to and literally as a companion to a tract by Jean Cherruyt, seigneur de Malestroit, is duly noted.

Mistakes do occur in the USTC. I do not think that a rare 1509 treatise Repertoyre et table tres exquis et familiers selon l’ordre des lettres de l’abc was written by our Jean Bodin. The first edition of the Topica by Nicolaus Everardi (1516) is ascribed to one of his sons, the poet Nicolaus Grudius, himself a brother of the more famous Neolatin poet Janus Secundus. In my Ph.D. thesis defended in 1994 I could already indicate rather more copies, and it is easy to add references to digitized copies of the first edition in 1516 and later editions in the Digitale Sammlungen of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich; in a post on this blog I give further information. Better than deploring these faults – or any omission – is simply realizing the history of the USTC’s primary focus on France still has consequences. However, it seems at first strange to find exactly one work by Cujacius, but when you look for Cujas, his name in French, you will find rather more! For the rest one can place questions marks about the tagging of Bodin’s treatise in the USTC. In most cases an edition of this treatise has the classification “Economics”, in one case “Jurisprudence”. It goes without saying that the USTC does indicate digitized copies in a fair number of cases, but it is not an all-embracing repertory of digitized books published in the sixteenth century.

The USTC can show you other things or lead to interesting questions. If you search for works on economics you will find a surprisingly large number of works written either in Dutch or coming from the Low Countries. In my view the USTC can help you framing and refining questions about the use of language, the large number of works published in a specific period or on a particular subject, or the favorite format of books. In an ideal world you could perhaps add a second preset field to distinguish among subjects for the classification “Academic dissertations”. The indication of languages for this class is unfortunate when for example a dissertation defended in Italy and written in Latin is nevertheless classified as Italian. It seems wise to use the resources of the USTC as an additional tool, and not as your only source of information, something which is anyway for any resource only seldom advisable, and as always you will have to check the information it provides.

Approaching French humanist lawyers online

The BVH and the USTC are just one of the gateways you might like to use to find digitized books of French humanist lawyers. On the page for digital libraries of Rechtshistorie, my legal history website, you will find links to some twenty French digital libraries. Some of them offer quick access to sources on general themes such as legislation, jurisprudence, verdicts (arrêts), customary law, consultations and legal dictionaries. In particular the – also recently restyled – portal Fontes Historiae Iuris (Université Lille-2) is very helpful for quick orientation, even when the digital editions have sometimes been poorly scanned at Gallica. Let’s smile about the statement that you will not need to look any further! For some regions special websites bring you to the coutumes, the customary law, with often both the texts of these resources and learned commentaries on them. At Bibliopedia you can find a very detailed list of French digital libraries, but alas without the majority of websites dedicated to the history of French law. In 2011 I wrote two posts on French legal history with a somewhat closer focus, the first on the law of Normandy, the second on a number of research institutions in Paris which are relevant for legal historians.

A service akin to Fontes Historiae Iuris for French legal history, but on a wider scale, is provided by the Post-Reformation Digital Library (Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary), a portal to digitized works by protestant authors. It contains for a substantial part links to books digitized elsewhere, and it has a nifty function for searching simultaneously with one action in a number of digital libraries. Other portals will help you as well to track down digitized versions of Early Modern books, for example Early Modern Thought Online of the FernUniversität Hagen, and the Philological Museum maintained by Dana Sutton (University of Birmingham). Another gateway for online resources concerning Early Modern History has been created by Sharon Howard (University of Sheffield). Her portal Early Modern Resources is truly impressive in its wide range and coverage of aspects of European history between 1500 and 1800.

Critics who scold some of these enterprises for their incompleteness, omissions and faults can seem to be hunting themselves for a utopian illusion, the One and Only Source of All Knowledge. French humanist lawyers did not live as recluses, isolated from the turbulent times around them. They did not stick with texts as they happened to look in print, but delved into the background. Ad fontes was one of their favorite mottos. In Reformation Europe they simply could not hide completely from all influences and developments in religion, politics and society. Scholars from other countries, too, came to France to join their efforts. As lawyers they rubbed shoulders with their colleagues in the field of law and justice. Their research into Roman law and other subjects of Classical Antiquity did not happen in an ivory tower. In this century we face the opportunities offered both by portals and by online resources themselves to acquaint us deeper than ever before with a world of five centuries ago with all its differences from and resemblances with our times.

A postscript

For your convenience it is worth knowing the separate website of the MONLOE project, (Montaigne à l’Œuvre) where you have quick access to the resources at Tours concerning Montaigne, including for example the 47 arrêts of the Parlement de Bordeaux for cases dealt with by Montaigne between 1562 and 1567 as a member of this judicial court.

For Cujacius one can benefit from the recent study by Xavier Prévost, Jacques Cujas 1522-1590, jurisconsulte humaniste (Geneva 2015).

Montaigne’s Library is a digital collection within the Cambridge Digital Library with books collected by Gilbert de Botton to recreate Montaigne’s own collection of books. Some of them are indeed his personal copies. Only a few works in it touch upon legal matters.

Antonio Agustín, a pioneer of the history of medieval canon law

During the sixteenth century European humanists developed their interest in the history of texts. Instead of just printing texts from old manuscripts they started comparing different versions of texts. Thus they stood at the cradle of philology and modern philological methods. The majority of these humanists devoted themselves to texts from Classical Antiquity, few of them set feet on the field of textual criticism for the Bible, and even less looked to legal texts other than the sources of Roman law. Antonio Agustín (1517-1586) was the first scholar to deal with the text of the Decretum Gratiani, the most important medieval collection of texts concerning canon law that held a central place in the study of canon law until 1917. In this post I will give an overview of his works, their accessibility online, and I will point to modern studies on his work and life.

A prince of scholars

Antonio Agustín – portrait early seventeenth century

Antonio Agustín y Albanell was born in 1517 in the Spanish town Zaragoza. His father was the vice-chancellor of Aragon. Already in 1526 Agustín went for his studies to university, first at Alcalá de Henares, two years later at Salamanca. In 1535 he started to study law at the university of Bologna, where he met Andrea Alciato (1492-1550), one of the foremost humanistic lawyers. In 1537 he went to Padua to study Greek. In 1541 Agustín received at Bologna the degree of doctor utriusque iuris, for both Roman and canon law. In the field of the history of Roman law Agustín made himself immediately known with his first published work. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century a small number of scholars examined the Codex Florentinus, the manuscript of Justinian’s Digest, since 1406 kept as a treasure in Florence. In 1543 Agustín published a study in which he argued that this manuscript is closer to the original text from the sixth century than the vulgate version of the Digest found in countless manuscripts since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and reprinted in many editions since the late fifteenth century. The Emendationum et opinionum libri quattuor were first published in Venice, and soon reprinted in Basel (1544) and Lyons. Using the Hathi Trust Digital Library it is possible to consult online two copies of the first edition held at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The edition Basel 1544 can be consulted online (Digitale Sammlungen, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich), and also the editions Lyons 1559, Lyons 1574 and Heidelberg 1594, all present at Munich.

Agustín’s career can be summarised fairly quickly, but this does not do justice to his scholarly activities. In 1544 Agustin became an auditor, judge, of the Rota Romana, one of the highest courts of the Catholic Church. Charles Lefebvre edited an unpublished text by Agustín on the practices of the Rota Romana in the volume Antonii Augustini Praxis Rotae. Jacobi Emerix Tractatus seu Notitiae S. Rotae Romanae : deux traités inédits sur la procédure de la S. Rote Romaine (Tournai, s.d. (1961)). The popes sent him on several diplomatic missions. In 1562 and 1563 he attended sessions of the Council of Trent. He became bishop of Alife in the Kingdom of Naples in 1556. In 1561 Agustín was called to the see of Lérida in Spain, and in 1576 he became archbishop of Tarragona, where he died in 1586. In the sixteenth century leading scholars wrote many letters to keep in touch with each other. Cándido Flores Sellés edited an Epistolario de Antonio Agustín (Salamanca 1980). Letters by Agustín are included in the Correspondance de Lelio Torelli avec Antonio Agustín et Jean Matal (1542-1553), Jean-Louis Ferrary (ed.) (Como 1992). Juan E. Alcina Rovira and Joan Salvadó Recasens have recently studied Agustín’s library, La biblioteca de Antonio Agustín. Los impresos de un humanista de la Contrarreforma (Alcañiz 2007). Many of his books and a number of manuscripts with Greek texts stemming from Agustin’s library found their way to the library of the Escorial.

In this post I will not discuss Agustín as a scholar of Roman law, even though he kept working in this field, too. In 1567 he even published two text editions in one volume, the Constitutiones Graecarum Codicis Justiniani imperatoris collectio et interpretatio, with the Greek constitutions in the Codex Justinianus, and Novellarum Juliani antecessoris Epitome, cum notis et constitutionibus, graece (Lérida 1567), with the Epitome Juliani. Pietro Fiorelli and Anna Maria Bartoletti Colombo edited the volume Iuliani epitome latina Novellarum Justiniani, secondo l’edizione di Gustavo Haenel e col glossario d’Antonio Agustín (Florence 1996) which uses Agustín’s work. Agustín edited also texts by Marcus Terentius Varro, Sextus Pomponius Festus and Marcus Verrius Flaccus, and he wrote about Roman antiquities and inscriptions. On Roman law he published further in particular De nominibus propriis tou Pandektou Florentini (Tarragona 1579; online in the Hathi Trust Digital Library) and De legibus et senatus consultis (Rome 1583; online at the Hathi Trust, at Granada and at Munich). For brevity’s sake I have skipped later editions of these works. In the eighteenth century appeared the collection Antonii Augustini Archiepiscopi Tarraconensis Opera omnia (8 vol., Lucca 1765-1774; online, Hathi Trust) which contains also a number of his letters.

Agustín and medieval canon law

The Council of Trent (1545-1563) had addressed many aspects of church life, but not canon law. Ecclesiastical law came under review during the pontificate of pope Pius V. He decided in 1566 that an official edition of the various sources within the Corpus Iuris Canonici should be made. The correctores Romani, a team of scholars, was charged with this task. Originally the commission would have been led by Antonio Agustín, but he declined this position. He kept in touch with the scholarly team. In 1580 pope Gregory XIII could finally promulgate the new edition, published in three volumes (Rome 1582), consultable online at the library of the University of California at Los Angeles. Recently Mary Sommar has published a study about the project for this edition, The Correctores Romani: Gratian’s Decretum and the counter-reformation humanists (Berlin 2009).

The sheer width of Agustín’s activity comes into sight when you realize he did not forget his episcopal duties. As bishop of Lérida he personally supervised the making of the Sacerdotale (…) Ilerdense (Lérida 1567), nowadays a rare work. The Institut d’Estudis Ilerdenc in Lérida has digitized its copy. As an archbishop he helped starting a printing firm at Tarragona. Agustín was responsible for the Constitutionum prouincialium Tarraconensium libri quinque (Tarragona 1580; online, Hathi Trust) and Constitutionum synodalium Tarraconensium partes quinque (Tarragona 1581; online, Hathi Trust). In the third volume of the Italian Opera omnia you can find a reprint of these constitutions, and also the synodal constitutions for this archdiocese. At Lérida appeared in 1576 the first edition of the Compilationes antiquae, with four of the five decretal collections before the Decretalium liber Gregorii IX – more commonly called the Liber Extra – was promulgated in 1234. Using the Hispana portal the Antiquae collectiones decretalium (Lérida 1576) can be found in digitized form at several Spanish libraries. They offer this work in the PDF format. At Munich you can consult a page by page version of this edition.

Agustín’s edition has been reprinted in source editions by scholars ever since, but no new edition of the Compilationes antiquae has appeared until now, for Emil Friedberg presented in his Quinque compilationes antiquae (…) (Leipzig 1882; reprint Graz 1956) only the incipits of the papal decretals included in these collections. Stephan Kuttner discussed Agustín’s edition in ‘Antonio Agustín’s edition of the Compilationes antiquae’, Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, New Series 7 (1977) 1-14. For the history of medieval canon law Agustín’s De emendatione Gratiani dialogorum libri duo (Tarragona 1587) is no doubt his most important work. I could find an online version of the first edition, again at the Hathi Trust Digital Library, but initially not for the important reprint edited by Étienne Baluze [Antonii Augustini archiepiscopi Tarraconensis dialogorum libri duo de emendatione Gratiani (Paris 1672) – online, Universitätsbibliothek Paderborn]. Agustín discusses matters such as the original title of Gratian’s work, the problem of misleading inscriptions of various canones, the sources used by Gratian and their supposed or real origin, in particular for canons stemming from church councils. He did notice at many turns erroneous attributions of canons. In particular canons from the collection ascribed to Isidorus Mercator got his attention, but even though Agustin expressed grave doubt about the quality of this collection he did not proceed here or elsewhere to a full examination of the complex of the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals. In the so-called Magdeburg Centuries (Historia ecclesiastica (…) (13 volumes, Basle, 1559-1574)) protestant historians had unmasked this collection as a massive falsification. For Catholic writers in the sixteenth century it was difficult to support this view. As few others Agustín was certainly equipped to deal with this problem.

The Epitome iuris pontificii veteris is the companion work to De emendatione Gratiani, and indeed without this compendium of canon law the latter would not have appeared at all. The first part of this Epitome was published at Tarragona in 1587; a digital version (PDF) has been created by the Universidad de Granada. In the first volume with the subtitle De personis Agustín deals with ecclesiastical functions, with laity and heretics, and at the end briefly with the position of Jews and pagans. The second and third volume were published posthumously for the first time as Iuris pontificii veteris epitome (…) at Rome between 1611 and 1614. The second volume deals with de rebus, matters, the third with de iudiciis, verdicts. At Ghent only the first and second volume of the 1611 edition have been digitized. In the second part Agustín starts with an overview of the history of conciliar collections before Gratian with the title De quibusdam veteribus canonum ecclesiasticorum collectoribus iudicium, et censura.

In the volume Canones paenitentiales (…) (Venice 1584; online, Hathi Trust) Agustín edited six texts concerning penance, including a Poenitentiale Romanum. He gives an introduction to the history of penance, penitential canones and in particular the early medieval libri paenitentiales. One of the reasons he adduces in his preface for taking interest in these sources is the fact that the Decretum Gratiani has not the same authority as papal decretals and conciliar canons, and therefore it is necessary to look at the original sources. The first edition of this edition appeared again in Tarragona in 1582. In an Epistola decretalis Innocentii III. Summi Pontificii (…) (Paris 1609; online, University Library, Ghent) the text of the famous decretal Per venerabilem (X. 4.7.13) of pope Innocent III from 1202 is given, a letter first included in the Compilatio Tertia (3 Comp. 4.12.2). The text of the decretal is taken from Agustín’s 1576 edition of the Compilationes quinque – at f. 209r-210r -, but the source of the following commentary is not clear. The core of the short introductory text is a defense of the prerogatives of the French king and the traditional independent ecclesiastical position of France.

Studying Antonio Agustín

Up to the twentieth century only a small group of scholars endeavoured on the paths first walked by Agustín. I mentioned already Étienne Baluze. Praise for Agustín came directly after his death in a work by Andreas Schott, a Flemish scholar, in his Laudatio funebris. V.Cl. Antonii Augustini (…) (Antwerp 1586). About this text José C. Miralles Maldonado recently wrote an article which can be consulted online, ‘Andreas Schott y su laudatio funebris en memoria del humanista aragonés Antonio Agustín’, Myrtia 23 (2008) 315-342. Gregorio Mayáns y Siscár (1699-1781) published a Vida de D. Antonio Agustín arzobispo de Tarragona (Madrid 1734), online in Munich. This work helped in the long run resuscitating interest in this sixteenth-century scholar. It led to the publication of his Opera omnia at Lucca between 1765 and 1774, and to several editions of his letters from manuscripts scattered around Europe. You can find online more interesting articles about Agustín and his correspondance, for example Jean-Louis Ferrary, ‘Les travaux d’Antonio Agustín à travers la lumière de lettres inédites à Lelio Torelli,’ Faventia (1992) 60-83, and Joan Carbonell Manils, ‘La relación epistolar inédita entro Antonio Agustín y el papa Gregorio XIII’, Faventia 22 (2000) 121-138. To these online articles one should add in particular an article by Cándido Flores Selles, ‘Respuestas ineditas de Antonio Agustín a consultas de amigos’, Revista de la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid 73 (1987-1988) 111-185. Francis M. de Zulueta devoted his 1939 David Murray Lecture to Don Antonio Agustín (Glasgow 1939), an eminently useful starting point if you would like to start with or stick to literature in English. M.H. Crawford edited a volume of essays on Agustín, Antonio Agustín between Renaissance and Counter-Reform (London 1993). Crawford wrote the article on Agustín for the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, Paul F. Grendler (ed.) (6 vol. New York 1999), in volume I, pp. 26-27. For sources about Agustíns library, his life and correspondence Marc Mayer’s article, ‘Towards a History of the Library of Antonio Agustín’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 60 (1997) 262-272, is well worth reading.

Agustín deserves his position among the pioneers of the history of Roman and canon law in particular for his unflagging interest in both fields. His interests in legal history were accompanied by studies on Classical Antiquity in the widest sense, including for example inscriptions. He wrote also about medals and even about heraldry. His Dialogos de las armas, i linages de la nobleza de España was published by Mayáns y Siscár (Madrid 1734), of which a facsimile edition appeared recently (Valencia 2005). It is again in the Digitale Sammlungen at Munich that you can find an online version of the 1734 edition, and for example also at Santiago de Compostela. Using the search functionalities at the Hispana portal you can find in Spain more digital versions of his works, and also some library catalogues with manuscripts of his works. Mentioning this work should not diminish the fact that Agustín was a scholar with a mind to work in major legal disciplines and the auxiliary historical sciences. He did not devote himself exclusively to one field, something which scholars nowadays all too often simply have to do. I hope this post shows you something of Agustíns versatility and his lasting importance for those who are working in the field of medieval canon law.

A postscript

In 2017 the university of Barcelona created a small but interesting virtual exhibit in memory of Agustín.