Iuris Historia: Liber Amicorum Gero Dolezalek (review)

This Festschrift in honor of the legal historian Gero Dolezalek (now at the University of Aberdeen) is congenial to his many talents and scholarly predilections. It starts with an introduction to his peripatetic career (pp. ix–xi) and a list of publications from 1966 to 2005 (pp. xiii–xxiv). The twenty-seven articles that follow are written in Spanish, Italian, English, German, and French by authors who know Dolezalek as an outstanding lecturer in their native tongue and from sojourns at his workplace from 1968–89, the Max-Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main. Most of the contributions faithfully reflect Dolezalek's interests by concentrating on cataloguing, literary format, individual authorship, and editing of works written by medieval jurists.

The articles are arranged chronologically and begin with essays by Annalisa Belloni (pp. 1–16) and Antonio Ciaralli (pp. 17–35) on the early medieval preservation of the Codex Florentinus, the most famous among surviving Digest manuscripts. They end with a comment by Michaela Reinckenhof (pp. 423–31) on the Roman law background of a liability provision in the German Civil Code. In between, there are, under the rubric of cataloguing, a survey by Martin Bertram and Paola Maffei (61–72) of medieval manuscripts at the Chapter of La Seu d'Urgell; Anders Winroth's description (pp. 141–44) of a twelfth-century fragment of Gratian's Decretum at Stockholm; a description of ms. Leipzig, UB Hänel 14, by André Gouron (pp. 131–39); and another of ms. Pesaro, Bibl. Oliveriana 26, by Carmen Tort-Martorell (pp. 37–60).

Literary genres are surveyed by Mario Ascheri (pp. 73–87) in his treatment of "peace" in Tuscan communal legislation; by Manlio Bellomo (pp. 249–65), who focuses on university statutes;by Vincenzo Colli (pp. 213–47) in the comprehensive overview of autographs and author's copies among medieval legal manuscripts, arguably the most ambitious piece of scholarship in the volume; and by Charles Donahue, Jr. (pp. 345–53) in a progress report on modern editions of ecclesiastical court records. In addition, Steffen Wunderlich (pp. 387–403) has treated legal consilia tied to litigation in the imperial courts of the early 1500s, and Douglas Osler (pp. 405–22) has covered Roman law literature from the early modern Netherlands.

Several contributors have analyzed individual texts, such as Diego Quaglioni (pp. 89–104), who tracks medieval references to Frederick Barbarossa's constitution, Omnis iurisdictio; Tammo Wallinga (pp. 105–19) in his study of a casus Codicis by Wilhelmus de Cabriano; Gisela Drossbach (pp. 145–59) in her presentation of the anonymous decretal collection known as Collectio Francofurtana; and Linda Fowler-Magerl (pp.267–80) in her remarks on a procedural ordo by the decretalist Bonus Iohannes, bishop of Lodi from 1252. Along similar lines, Antonio Padoa Schioppa (pp. 281–92) examines the procedural Formularium of Martinus Fanensis, Gerard Giordanengo (pp. 323–44) analyzes the Dictionarium iuris of the Dominican John of Erfurt, and Ennio Cortese (pp. 369–85) covers the works of Bartolus edited by Thomas Diplovatatius.

Three authors edit Latin texts. Questiones by Henricus Anglicus and Henricus de Scotia are introduced and transcribed by Orazio Condorelli (pp. 293–13), Domenico Maffei (pp. 315–21) publishes several questiones by Osbertus Cremonensis, and Julius Kirshner (pp. 355–68) offers a consilium of Torello de Torellis. Barely outside the celebrant's focus are the articles by Peter Landau (pp. 121–30) on the existence of a distinct law school at Mantua around 1160 and several studies dedicated to the history of doctrine, including Laurent Mayali's (pp. 161–75) on the nature of conjugal union according to the biblical formula, "duo erunt in carne una"; Chris Coppens's (pp. 177–91) on how French decretists invoked Roman leges against Church law and in support of local custom; and Emanuele Conte's (pp. 193–212) on twelfth-century jurists who cited imperial Roman law in favor of...