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Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog
Legal history with a Dutch view

City statutes and legal order in medieval Italy

One of the most characteristic features of medieval Italy is the amazing quantity of large and small towns. Within these
towns there might be feuds about the supremacy of families or guilds, but to the world at large Berce pride of one’s own
town reigned supreme. Many Italian towns had since the twelfth century or even earlier their own city council which issued
laws in the form of statuti. Thus medieval lawyers had already to deal with questions about which law had to be obeyed in
case of collision of laws. Albericus de Rosciate (Alberico da Rosate) (around 1290-1360) wrote a long tract De statutis, in early
editions also appearing under the title Quaestiones statutorum. At Munich the incunable edition Como 1477 of this work has
been digitized. Alberico was preceded by Alberto Gandino (around 1240-1305) , mainly known for his Tractatus de mal-
e3ciis edited by Hermann Kantorowicz, but also responsible for quaestiones statutorum written around 1284, published by A.
Solmi in the Bibliotheca iuridica medii aevi. Scripta anecdota glossatorum, Augusto Gaudenzi and Giovanni Battista Palmiero
(eds.) (3 vol., Bononiae 1888-1903; reprint Torino 1962; Gandinus’ text is in vol. 3, 157-214). The way medieval lawyers dealt
with municipal laws is the subject of the great study by Mario Sbriccoli, L’interpretazione dello statuto. Contributo alla storia
della funzione di giuristi nell’età comunale (Milano 1969). Sbriccoli was not the Brst to write about this subject. City guilds and
confraternities, too, had their own statutes and ordinances. The Italian historiography on statutes has a long and colorful
tradition.

Just before Christmas Mike Widener, curator of rare books at the Lilian Goldman Law Library of Yale Law School, blogged
about the presentation in Rome on November 23, 2011, of the edition of a manuscript at Yale with the statuti of
Montebuono, a town in Rieti, some Bfty kilometers north of Rome. Widener gives more details about these Bfteenth-century
statuti in his post. In 2008 the library of Yale Law School organized an exhibit on early Italian statutes. In the online version of
the exhibit you can Bnd a very useful commented overview of editions, bibliographies and online resources. The presenta
tion in November of this year was held at the Biblioteca dello Senato in Rome which undoubted has the largest collection of
printed Italian statutes worldwide. You can use a special online catalogue to search its holdings for this Beld alone.

It is dibcult but worthwhile to add substantial information to Widener’s 2008 overview. When you search for statuti in the
Hathi Trust Digital Library you will Bnd a few dozen digitized editions of municipal statutes, and also some studies. Using the
Internet Archive yields roughly estimated the same number of results. The much more user-friendly interface of digitized
books held in the Internet Archive – and now also at the Hathi Trust Digital Library – is a major advantage on using the books
digitized by the monopolizing Brm at its own book subdomain. Avoiding the name of this multinational Brm is a kind of run
ning gag here, but it is very much like not choosing spaghetti when literally hundreds of other forms of pasta exist… The
German ZVDD Bnds also some Bfty digitized Italian city statutes, but BASE, the Bielefeld Search Engine, does Bnd more. The
Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog (Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue) allows you to search with one search action not only many library
catalogues and collective catalogues, but also the ZVDD and BASE.

A few websites presenting municipal statutes from Italy not listed by Widener in 2008 can be added here. The Società

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Pistoiese di Storia Patria has digitized a number of the statuti of Pistoia published by this learned society. You will Bnd there
also the edition of regesta, standardized summaries, of charters for several ecclesiastical institutions in this Tuscan town,
and an edition of census records. Mario Ascheri and Silvio Pucci have created a website with a searchable database for the
Statuta Reipublicae Senensis, the city statutes and the later statutes dello Stato of Siena. Donatella Ciamponi has created a
bibliography of medieval municipal statutes in the Siena and Grosseto area. Her bibliography can be found among the digi
tized materials at the website of the Dipartimento di Storia at the Università degli Studi di Siena. Here I would single out the
bibliography of medieval Siena and the edition of statutes of the Lega del Chianti (1384). The website on municipal statutes in
the Liguria region of Rodolfo Savelli at Genoa which features also a bibliography on this subject, mentioned by Widener,
does point to a project with digitized texts from Pisa. Among them are juridical texts, foremost the Constitutum Legis Pisanae
Civitatis. The Società Ligure di Storia Patria has plans to digitize more editions of medieval sources. I mention this website in
particular because you will Bnd here links to the websites of many other regional historical societies in Italy.

Probably more websites with digitized statutes exist but I have not yet found them at any of the Italian biblioteche pubbliche
statali, the main state archives (Archivi di Stato) and city archives. Please do not hesitate to share your knowledge if you
know more! In this post I have linked the names of Alberico da Rosate and Alberto Gandino to the website of the publisher
of the Dizionario Biogra3co degli Italiani. This company also publishes an encyclopedia and a vocabulary of the Italian lan-
guage, useful if you want to study Italian history in any real depth. The article on Alberico da Rosate by Luigi Prosdocimi
dates from 1960, but the article on Gandino by Diego Quaglioni was originally published in 1999. Both articles have a com
prehensive bibliography.

American scholars can beneBt from the rich holdings concerning Italian statutes and other juridical books at Yale Law
School, at Harvard and at the Law Library of the Library of Congress. In the Netherlands the collection of Eduard Maurits
Meijers (1880-1954) contains a number of early editions of Italian municipal statutes, now held at Leiden University Library
In Utrecht, too, you will Bnd some editions of medieval statuti. The Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in
Frankfurt am Main has really rich holdings on the history of medieval law in Italy. Its library should be one of the places to
visit before you will Bnd more in Italy.

2011

With this post I reach the end of 2011. In 2010 I wrote 35 posts, this year brought nearly 50 posts, almost one post every
week. I hope you have enjoyed reading my contributions. Thanks to everyone who sent comments here, by e-mail and even
in tweets! This year I have skipped the seasonal post simply because there has been no snow this month.

A postscript

When I decided to correct a few things here I wanted to have a look at another major gateway to digitized information. The
results are dioerent from what I had expected. They qualify for a rather long postscript.

When you add the Europeana portal to the array of possible gateways to digitized editions you might in principle Bnd a lot of
Italian statutes. However, much to my dismay I cannot detect anymore the advanced search mode which enables you to
search directly for titles and to narrow your search ebciently. The new search mode is to some extent an English version of
the old mnemonic maxim quis, quid, cur, quomodo, ubi, quando, quibus auxiliis: of the Five W’s you will Bnd who, what, when
and where. The re3ne search option is not completely useless, but surely more vague than necessary. By all means it is a set
back when the carefully developed way to access information is thrown away without any warning. Fuzzy search or associa

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tive search would be more welcome as a second search mode, not as an exclusive way to search information at this portal
which prides itself on the huge amounts of content from many corners. Some people will want to cast a wide net, but others
have very precise search questions, and both approaches should be equally possible.

I would have liked to pass silently over the fact that you will Bnd in a search for Italian statutes at Europeana also results
with only the bibliographical data assembled in the EDIT16 project, which is not a digital library, but a bibliographical data
base. Surely you need to know not just something about bibliography when you search for these old statutes. In a project
like Europeana a catalogue is simply not at the same level as access to digitized items, unless you like to swim in an ocean of
ill digested information. There is a real need to distinguish between data and meta-data. Luckily Europeana has not deleted
the Blter function in the search interface. In fact this becomes more important than before. Is Europeana becoming a victim
of the old proverb multa sed non multum, a lot of things but not much? The number of subdomains and new branches with
interesting initiatives is impressive, as are some results, too, but it seems the core needs all possible care and attention. The
Europeana Regia project with digitized medieval manuscripts has no search interface at all, only predeBned selections and
Blters.

David Haskiya of the Europeana team sent a comment in which he explains you can still use the search parameters of the
advanced search, such as title and creator. User statistics show only a very small percentage of users did use the advanced
search interface.

A second postscript

A salutary warning not to isolate the text and importance of medieval Italian city statutes is provided by the Atlante della doc
umentazione comunale (secoli XII-XIV), a project under the aegis of Scrineum (Università di Pavia) with online editions of texts
concerning the administration and government of several Italian towns. The section on statuti contains only a notice about
work in progress.

Finding more…

Two months after the second postscript I can add at least one online edition of medieval Italian city statutes, the project
Statuti di Vicenza del 1264. The bibliography at this website is not only concerned with city statutes, but also with diplomat
ics and the technical aspects of digital editions. Patrick Sahle (Universität Köln) mentioned it in his annotated list of scholarly
digital editions. Sahle’s list contains also a project for statuti from Grosseto, but alas the link is broken.

A 2015 postscript

Mike Widener (Lillian Goldman Library, Yale Law School) has created an inventory of manuscripts with Italian statutes in the
holdings of Yale Law School.

This entry was posted in Digital editions and tagged Early printed books, Italy, Legal history, Medieval law on December 28,
2011 [https://rechtsgeschiedenis.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/city-statutes-and-legal-order-in-medieval-italy/] by rechts-
geschiedenis.

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4 thoughts on “City statutes and legal order in medieval Italy”

Klaus Graf
December 29, 2011 at 01:17

This is another wonderful entry, thank you Otto!

kadmeianletters
December 30, 2011 at 11:30

Hi Otto,
We removed the advanced search option in the interfaces as it was used by less than 0.1% of visitors to the portal.

You can still perform advanced searches though. To do it just type in the name of the metadata Beld you want to search fol
lowed by a colon and then your search parameter.

Two examples:
http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search.html?query=title%3A+Tractatus+de+maleBciis+

http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search.html?query=creator%3A+Bonaini%2C+Francesco

I’ll notify The European Library that the ICCU records are “empty”.

Best regards,
David

rechtsgeschiedenis Post author

December 30, 2011 at 11:38

Thank you for you quick and clear answer, David! As a scholar I am really amazed by the fact so few users of Europeana use
the advanced search. Has this to do with the intended public of Europeana? It was indeed my silent hope that those wanting
to search more exactly can still use search parameters such as title and creator in the search Beld. In the EDIT16 database of
ICCU only some digitized title pages and sometimes a few pages more are given. Anyway, perhaps the removal of the ad-
vanced search mode might have qualiBed for a news item on the Europeana blog, where you could have demonstrated the
use of the visitor statistics.

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As for searching manuscripts at Europeana Regia I am thinking of devoting a post to it.

David
December 30, 2011 at 18:10

It’s a general pattern for all search sites that Advanced Searches are very rare. In the low percentages at most. There’s some
debate though whether that’s not also an eoect of badly designed Advanced Search user interfaces. At some point we
should make a write-up on advanced searching by Belded queries and boolean operators.

And yes, in general Europeana is not really focusing on the scholar as user but more the non-professional user: the inter-
ested citizen or amateur scholar. Our sister project The European Library will focus on the scholars and researchers.
Scholars like you are still very welcome though!

Europeana Regia is quite loosely connected to us and I’m not sure their own website is really meant to be a long-term search
service . In any case, whet we have from them you can get here:
http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search.html?query=relation%3A+europeana+regia

I’m sorry if the reasoning behind removing the Advanced Search option weren’t communicated properly. For a more full
write-up on the latest changes to the Europeana portal I’ll point you to my own blog, http://kadmeianletters.wordpress.com
/2011/10/11/some-background-on-the-updated-europeana-portal/

Best,
David

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