Accursius

The grave for Accursius and for his son Franciscus, in Bologna, Italy. Accursius (Italian: Accursio or Accorso di Bagnolo; c. 11821263) 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".

Biography Accursius was born at Impruneta, near Florence. 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, Indeed, modern research has shown that Accursius' work contains nearly 100,000 glosses. The best edition is that of Denis Godefroy, published at Lyon in 1589, in six folio volumes.

Family Three of his four sons were also jurists: Cervottus, Guilelmus and the noted Franciscus. The latter is buried with his father in one of the arcs lining the street near the Basilica of San Francesco, Bologna.

Recognition For his magnum opus, 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 lower estimate of his merits. Henry de Bracton