 | This article includes alist of references,related reading, orexternal links,but its sources remain unclear because it lacksinline citations. Please helpimprove this article byintroducing more precise citations.(November 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
The scholars of the 11th- and 12th-century legal schools inItaly,France andGermany are identified asglossators in a specific sense. They studiedRoman law based on theDigesta, theCodex ofJustinian, theAuthenticum (an abridged Latin translation of selected constitutions of Justinian, promulgated in Greek after the enactment of theCodex and therefore calledNovellae), and his law manual, theInstitutiones Iustiniani, compiled together in theCorpus Iuris Civilis. (This title is itself only a sixteenth-century printers' invention.) Their work transformed the inherited ancient texts into a living tradition ofmedieval Roman law.
The glossators conducted detailed text studies that resulted in collections of explanations. For their work they used a method of study unknown to the Romans themselves, insisting that contradictions in the legal material were only apparent. They tried to harmonize the sources in the conviction that for every legal question only one binding rule exists. Thus they approached these legal sources in adialectical way, which is a characteristic of medievalscholasticism. They sometimes needed to invent new concepts not found in Roman law, such ashalf-proof (evidence short of full proof but of some force, such as a single witness). In other medieval disciplines, for exampletheology andphilosophy, glosses were also made on the main authoritative texts.
In theGreek language, γλῶσσα (glossa) means "tongue" or "language." Originally, the word was used to denote an explanation of an unfamiliar word, but its scope gradually expanded to the more general sense of "commentary". The glossators used to write in the margins of the old texts (glosa marginalis) or between the lines (glosa interlinearis - interlinear glosses). Later these were gathered into large collections, first copied as separate books, but also quickly written in the margins of the legal texts. The medieval copyists atBologna developed a typical script to enhance the legibility of both the main text and the glosses. The typically Bolognese script is called theLittera Bononiensis.
Accursius'sGlossa ordinaria, the final standard redaction of these glosses, contains around 100,000 glosses. Accursius worked for decades on this task. There exists no critical edition of his glosses.
In the older historiography of the medievallearned law, the view developed that after the standard gloss had become fixed a generation of so-calledcommentators started to take over from the glossators. In fact, the early medieval legal scholars, too, wrote commentaries and lectures, but their main effort was indeed creating glosses.
Most of the older glosses are accessible only in medieval manuscripts: modern editions of only a few manuscripts exist. The main microfilm collections of glossed legal manuscripts are at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main, at the universities of Munich, Würzburg, Milan, Leyden and Berkeley.
