Accursius

Accursius was an Italian jurist born around 1182 who died in 1263. He organized and compiled the scattered glosses of earlier legal scholars on Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis into the Glossa Ordinaria, or Great Gloss, a work of nearly one hundred thousand individual glosses that became the starting point for every exegesis of Roman law after the mid thirteenth century, and was even given the force of law in some jurisdictions. Though not classically educated, contemporaries called him the Idol of the Jurisconsults, and his compilation remained foundational to legal study for centuries despite later humanist criticism.