Medieval Glossators and Commentators

Medieval Glossators and Commentators gathers the scholars who revived the systematic study of Roman civil law in medieval Europe, from the eleventh century glossators of Bologna who wrote marginal notes, glosses, explaining the rediscovered text of Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis, through the fourteenth century commentators, or post-glossators, who built practical legal doctrine on top of those glosses, and the notaries, canon lawyers and churchman-jurists of the wider medieval Latin and Byzantine legal world who drew on the same Roman law tradition. Their work, restating and systematizing Roman civil law for a Europe that had largely lost direct access to it, is the direct ancestor of every national civil code tradition grouped elsewhere in this subcategory.