Franciscus Accursius
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Franciscus Accursius (in Italian Francesco Accorso) (Florence, c. 1182–Bologna, c. 1260) was an Italian jurist. He is notable for his organization of the glosses, the medieval comments on Justinian's codification of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis. He was not proficient in the classics, but he was called "the Idol of the Jurisconsults".
Accursius was born at Florence about 1182. A pupil of Azo, he first practised law in his native city, and was afterwards appointed professor at Bologna, where he had great success as a teacher. He undertook to arrange into one body the tens of thousands of comments and remarks upon the Code, the Institutes and Digests. Accursius assembled from the various earlier glosses for each of these texts a coherent and consistent body of glosses. This compilation, soon given the title Glossa ordinaria or magistralis, and usually known as the Great Gloss, has more method than that of any preceding writer on the subject. Modern research has shown that Accursius' work contains nearly 100,000 glosses. The best edition is that of Denis Godefroi (1540-1621), published at Lyon in 1589, in six folio volumes.
While Accursius was employed in this work, legend has it that, hearing of a similar one proposed and begun by Odofred, another lawyer of Bologna, he feigned indisposition, interrupted his public lectures, and shut himself up, till with the utmost expedition he had accomplished his design. Accursius was extolled by the lawyers of his own and the immediately succeeding age as the greatest glossator, and he was even called the idol of jurisconsults, but those of later times formed a much lower estimate of his merits. There can be no doubt that he disentangled the sense of many laws with much skill, but it is equally undeniable that his ignorance of history and antiquities often led him into absurdities, and was the cause of many defects in his explanations and commentaries. He died at Bologna in about 1260.
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- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.
