the phenomenon be due to lack of information as to antecedents? and the flare of the final achievement even darken what went before? Yet, in fact, as a movement nears its climax, it may become more rapid. For, as the promoting energies and favouring conditions meet in conjunction, their joint action becomes more effective. Forces free themselves from cumbrances and draw aid from one another. Thus when the gradual growth of intellectual faculty effects a conjunction with circumstances which offer a fair field, and the prizes of life as a reward, a rapid increase of power may evince itself in novel and timely productivity.
This may suggest the manner of the apparently sudden rise of the Bologna school of Roman law, which, be it noted, took place but a little before the time of Gratian's achievement in the Canon law, itself contemporaneous with the appearance of Peter Lombard's novel Books of Sentences.[1] The preparation, although obscure, existed; and the school after its commencement passed onward through stages of development, to its best accomplishment, and then into a condition of stasis, if not decline. Irnerius apparently was its first master; and of his life little is known. He was a native of Bologna. His name as causidicus is attached to a State paper of the year 1113. Thereafter he appears in the service of the German emperor Henry V. We have no sure trace of him after 1118, though there is no reason to suppose that he did not live and labour for some further years. He had taught the Arts at Ravenna and Bologna before teaching, or perhaps seriously studying, the law. But his career as a teacher of the law doubtless began before the year 1113, when he is first met with as a man of affairs. Accounts agree in ascribing to him the foundation of the school.
Unless the Summa Codicis already mentioned, and a book of Quaestiones, be really his, his glosses upon Justinian's Digest, Codex, and Novels, are all we have of him;[2] of the
- ↑ Post, Chapter XXXV., i.
- ↑ The Bologna school is commonly called the school of the glossators. Their work was to expound the law of Justinian; and their glosses, or explanatory notes, were the part of their writings which had the most permanent influence. The glosses were originally written between the lines or on the margins of the codices of the Digest, Codex, Novels, and Institutes.
