rest we know by report. The glosses themselves indicate that this jurist had been a grammarian, and used the learning of his former profession in his exposition of the law. His interlinear glosses are explanations of words, and would seem to represent his earlier, more tentative, work when he was himself learning the meaning of the law. But the marginal glosses are short expositions of the passages to which they are attached, and perhaps belong to the time of his fuller command over the legal material. They indicate, besides, a critical consideration of the text, and even of the original connection which the passage in the Digest held in the work of the jurisconsult from which it had been taken. Some of them show an understanding of the chronological sequence of the sources of the Roman law, e.g. that the lawmaking power had existed in the people and then passed to the emperors. These glosses of Irnerius represent a clear advance in jurisprudence over any previous legal comment subsequent to the Interpretatio attached to the Breviarium. It was also part of his plan to equip his manuscripts of the Codex with extracts taken from the text of the Novels, and not from the Epitome of Julian. He appears also as a lawyer versed in the practice of the law. For he wrote a book of forms for notaries and a treatise on procedure, neither of which is extant.[1]
The accomplishment of the Bologna school may be judged more fully from the works, still extant, of some of its chief representatives in the generations following Irnerius. A worthy one was Placentinus, a native of Piacenza. The year of his birth is unknown, but he died in 1192, after a presumably full span of life, passed chiefly as a student and teacher of the law. He taught in Mantua and Montpellier, as well as in Bologna. He was an accomplished jurist and a lover of the classic literature. His work entitled De varietate actionum was apparently the first attempt to set forth the Roman law in an arrangement and form that did not follow the sources.[2] He opens his treatise with an
- ↑ Savigny gives examples of Irnerius's glosses in an appendix to the fourth volume of his Gesehichte. Pescatore (Die Glossen des Irnerius, Greifswald, 1888) maintains that Savigny overstates the difference between the interlinear and the marginal glosses of Irnerius.
- ↑ On Placentinus see Savigny, Gesehichte, iv. pp. 244-285.
