Roman Public Law in the Twelfth Century: Politics, Jurisprudence, and Reverence for Antiquity

Over in the Latin west, Roman law was being made to account for new relationships and personalities within an enlarging scope of ‘law’, thanks in equal parts to the rediscovery of Justinian and the acceptance by universities that law was an academic discipline as well as a practical art. This chapter shows that a new enthusiasm for antiquity was at the core of the institutional renewal of the 12th Century. The Tuscan judge Roland of Lucca found recurrent need to refer to a number of Roman law statements about churches in order to elaborate his legal thinking about cities and public property throughout his Summa Trium Librorum (ca. 1195–1234)