Toronto Studies in Medieval Law – serie

Jurists and Jurisprudence in Medieval Italy is an original collection of texts exemplifying medieval Italian jurisprudence, known as the ius commune. Translated for the first time into English, many of the texts exist only in early printed editions and manuscripts. Featuring commentaries by leading medieval civil law jurists, notably Azo Portius, Accursius, Albertus Gandinus, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, and Baldus de Ubaldis, this book covers a wide range of topics, including how to teach and study law, the production of legal texts, the ethical norms guiding practitioners, civil and criminal procedures, and family matters.

The translations, together with context-setting introductions, highlight fundamental legal concepts and practices and the milieu in which jurists operated. They offer entry points for exploring perennial subjects such as the professionalization of lawyers, the tangled relationship between law and morality, the role of gender in the socio-legal order, and the extent to which the ius commune can be considered an autonomous system of law.

Jurists and Jurisprudence in Medieval Italy is an original collection of texts exemplifying medieval Italian jurisprudence, known as the ius commune. Translated for the first time into English, many of the texts exist only in early printed editions and manuscripts. Featuring commentaries by leading medieval civil law jurists, notably Azo Portius, Accursius, Albertus Gandinus, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, and Baldus de Ubaldis, this book covers a wide range of topics, including how to teach and study law, the production of legal texts, the ethical norms guiding practitioners, civil and criminal procedures, and family matters.

The translations, together with context-setting introductions, highlight fundamental legal concepts and practices and the milieu in which jurists operated. They offer entry points for exploring perennial subjects such as the professionalization of lawyers, the tangled relationship between law and morality, the role of gender in the socio-legal order, and the extent to which the ius commune can be considered an autonomous system of law.

Saint Antoninus of Florence was a Dominican friar and archbishop of Florence from 1446 to 1459. He composed one of the most comprehensive manuals of moral theology, the Summa, which has long been counted among the more copious, influential, and rewarding medieval sources.

St Antoninus of Florence on Trade, Merchants, and Workers gives an orientation to the life and teaching of Saint Antoninus, focusing on his writings on economic ethics, and includes a critical edition of his original Latin text with an English translation. The book provides an extensive introduction to his thought, situating it in its intellectual and social context, and elucidates the development of medieval economic and moral doctrines in law and theology. Jason Aaron Brown examines historians’ arguments about Italian business culture in the wake of the medieval “Commercial Revolution” and whether this culture can be considered capitalistic. He concludes that while Saint Antoninus is surprisingly modern in the economic concepts he deploys, his moral teaching on proper means and ends in the marketplace stood against certain nascent capitalistic tendencies in fifteenth-century Florence. Through examination of the manuscripts, this book opens a window into a premodern author’s writing process that will be of interest to scholars of medieval manuscripts and literary production.