In 1875, Gustav Haenel described a number of twelfth-century commentaries and glosses on the title De regulis iuris of the Digest, some of them being an-notations of Bulgarus’ celebrated apparatus and others, independent writings. Among the latter, a lemmatic commentary contained in a MS then owned by himself — now Leipzig, Univ. MS Haen. 12, fol. 25ff. — is of especial interest: as Haenel showed, the commentator may have had some ecclesiastical background and evidently was connected with Cologne or Mainz. It therefore comes as a pleasant confirmation of Haenel's cautious deductions that the author can be identified as Master Bertram, Bishop of Metz (sed. 1180–1212), and a member of the circle of Gerard Pucelle, the English master whose importance for the short-lived school of Cologne has been recently discussed.

As in the Select Bibliography for 1955–1956 we have sought to list primarily those publications which contain new information about canonists or canonistic sources or which print substantial quotations from unpublished manuscripts. Publications of the year 1956 are included only when they were received too late to be listed in the previous Bibliography.