19 - The civil law

Summary

The general development of civil law literature

During the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth, civil law underwent important changes which affected both the text of the collections encompassed in the Corpus iuris civilis and legal scholarship. Throughout the period, legal methods both in scholis and in curiis were dominated by the mos italicus, which ignored a general systematization of the law and emphasized the application to the present of rules derived from a scholastic analysis of the authoritative texts. This was strongly challenged, in particular from the 1520s onwards, by legal humanists and their sympathizers, who devoted themselves to the understanding of ancient law by the application of historical and philological method (mos gallicus).

The literature of the late medieval and sixteenth-century mos italicus has often been branded as characterizing a period of decline in legal science, although it is acknowledged to have contributed strongly to the so-called ‘reception’ of ius commune in Europe. It certainly enjoyed considerable success, to judge by the numerous sixteenth-century editions and reprints of the standard mos italicus works, often in multi-volume folios. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, mos italicus authors were still all-important at Oxford and Cambridge and provided the authorities most widely quoted by the practitioners of Doctors’ Commons. The proliferation of mos italicus authorities also had an influence on some broader developments within itself. The texts of the Corpus iuris civilis, almost always accompanied by the standard Accursian gloss, remained the foundation of the whole civil law system.