The origins of medieval jurisprudence: Pavia and Bologna, 850-1150 (review)

148 Reviews Middle Ages (The Rule of St. Augustine in medievd monasticism). Her answer touches upon large scde aspects of medievd society and mentdity and derives something from the enterprising ideas of Charles Radding. A find paper (A computer index of medievd Castilian Fueros) describes a project to index the contents of Spanish municipd law codes from the 10th to the 14th centuries 'using the database management program Datatrieve, which is instdled on Fordham University's DEC-20 mdnframe computer'. The project has already achieved a certain amount John O. Ward Department of History University of Sydney Radding, CM., The origins ofmedievaljurisprudence: Pavia and Bologna, 8501150 , N e w Haven, Y d e U.P., 1988; pp.xiii, 258; R.RP. U S $25.00. Radding's task in this book was deceptively simple: to dispel the myths which sunound the origins of the famous studium of law at Bologna and to demonstrate the probabilities of its red origins lying in the traditions of Lombard legd science at Pavia. Simple as the task may seem, it was in fact extremely complex because of the difficult nature of the primary sources and the huge burden of a century of historical scholarship which has been more frequently obfuscating than illuminating. Radding's achievement in cutting through the complexities of the subject and producing a readable text easily comprehensible even to those who know no law is very considerable indeed. The institutiond progression may be encapsulated as follows. Lombard, Frankish, and Saxon kings and emperors of the Regnum Italiae issued a continuous stream of laws from the Edict ofRothar (643) through to the twelfth century. From the ninth century, iudices sacri palatii at Pavia administered the law in Lombardy. In the mid-tenth century Pavia's prestige began to decline as a product of its waning poUticd importance and the activities of the judges began to spread further afield. The pre-eminence of Pavian judges over others from as far as Tuscany and the Ravennate dso began to be eroded. By the early eleventh century there was a meeting of judges trained in Lombard law with those trained in Roman law accompanied by evidence of an influence of Roman law itself on the thinking of Lombard judges. Judges of the first half of the eleventh century, later known disparagingly as the antiqui, made significant advances in the interpretation and teaching of the law. The earliest apparatuses to the law date from their period. From ca. 1050-1150 there survive a large number of Romano-Lombard glosses, abridgements, excerpts, tractates on procedure, expositiones, quaestiones and treatises eventudly verging on summae. The Reviews 149 successors of the antiqui, the moderni, pushed the andysis of what had become Romano-Lombard law to new heights in the second half of the eleventh century. Pepo, theteacherof Irnerius, was a Romano-Lombard jurist working in Tuscany and attached to the circles of the famous countess Matilda. Irnerius himself began his career in his master's circles and there are forceful indications in his surviving glosses of his intellectud heritage from the Lombard jurists. Accompanying the institutiond progression was an even more important intellectual progression. The early judges merely expounded the law. Interpretation and andysis was not part of their vocation. This situation lasted until the late tenth or early eleventh century when judges compiling texts for practicd purposes began to select amongst the laws, to order them by subject, and to bring Roman Law to bear upon their interpretation. The antiqui began to conect M S S on the basis of juridicd logic,totreat the laws as a coherent whole, to apply generd principles to interpretation and defence of laws, and, most importantly, to apply the distinction technique of didecticd method. The moderni brought Lombard Law intorelationshipwith Roman Law, asserting the priority of the latter where the former was silent They developed their techmques to elucidate legal concepts lying behind individual laws. In Wdcauso's apparatus to the Liber Legis Langobardorum juridicd comment became incorporated into the text of the laws. Glosses became lengthier, hypotheticd cases wereraised,attention was payed to the law's intent and to defining the scope of laws, and texts of the Justinianate corpus made...