Lawyers and Church in Renaissance 137
maintained that this legal renaissance, one of the earliest in
point of time, was fraught with the most important conse-
quences for the history of European ideas and institutions.
Imerius and his immediate followers were concerned with
the establishment of the accurate text of Justinian’s Code
and Digest. When this had been accomplished, interest cen-
tered on an accurate exposition of the meaning of the text.
The method by which this was exponded was that of margi-
nal notes called “Glosses.” Hence, we call the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries the age of the Glossators of whom the
greatest representative was Accursius who produced his great
Gloss on the text of Roman Law in the twelfth century.
A later generation became more interested in the applica-
tion of these authoritative texts to contemporary conditions
than they were in the further exploration of their historical
meaning. This effort to adapt Roman Law to feudal and
ecclesiastical conditions culminated in the age of the post-
Glossators in the fourteenth century. Bartolus of Sassoferrato
who produced enormous volumes of commentaries became
recognized as the most significant interpreter. By the time
of Bartolus the teaching of civil law was firmly established
in many of the Italian and some of the northern universities.
A class of notaries, judges, and professors of law had been
created whose relationships with the cultural life of the com-
munity they served has never been sufficiently explored.
In the earliest period of humanism in Italy we find that
many of the lawyers contributed directly to the study of
classical texts and the enthusiasm for the better apprehension
of the classical past. In the pre-Petrarchan circle at Padua,
for example, notaries and judges made collections called
florilegia in which they assembled literary anecdotes and bits
of wisdom culled from various ancient authors. In the follow-