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TRACTATUS UNIVERSI IURIS (VENICE 1584–86)

SpinesTUI

An ‘Ocean of Law’. The Harvard Law School’s copy of TUI1584 is bound in 29 physical volumes, 17 inches high, 18 ‘tomes’ in 25 physical volumes and 4 physical volumes of indices.



TRACTATUS UNIVERSI IURIS (VENICE 1584–86)

INTRODUCTION

The massive collection of treatises dealing with all topics of the ius commune published by Franciso Ziletti in the years 1584–1586 in 18 ‘tomes’ and 25 physical volumes under the title Tractatus universi iuris, duce, & auspice Gregorio XIII pontifice maximo in unum congesti: additis quamplurimis antea nunquam editis, hac* nota designatis XVIII, materias, XXV, voluminibus comprehendentes (TUI 1584) has long been known to scholars as a convenient, if not always totally accurate, compilation of much that is useful from the period and quite a bit that antedates the period. The Harvard Law Library in collaboration with the Ames Foundation has had the library’s copy digitized. The work is a bibliographical challenge. A recent count comes up with 754 titles by 362 authors. Not all the works by well-known authors are correctly attributed, and some of the more obscure authors are obscure indeed. We have made a start on producing proper metadata for this digital edition, a preliminary edition of metadata for the all eighteen tomes (not including the index volumes), a ‘first edition’ for tomes 1–4 and a ‘preliminary’ edition for tomes 5–18, and a conspectus of the authors in the same tomes (but only about half of those in tomes 13–18):

Authors’ List. Our attempt to create metadata for these volumes begins with a list of authors (complete, except for about half of those who appear only in tomes 13–22). A separate list of authors seemed like a good idea, because many of the authors have more than one attribution in TUI 1584. In the list, we do our best to place the author in time and time and place, give a very brief biography, a reference to an existing biography, or, lacking a biography, what we have learned about him so far, give references to our sources for the information, and references to where in TUI 1584 there is an item attributed to him, hyperlinked to the tome-by-tome lists of titles. Pending the creation of a proper search engine, searching this page will probably be for most users the easiest way to access the data in the titles and authors pages. After tome 4, some of the notes give only a reference to a standard biographical account. More about what we done with the authors can be found in the introduction to the authors’ list.

Titles and Authors’ Lists. Separate pages give the metadata for each tome and lists of titles and authors. At the beginning of each page, we say, or plan to say, something about the contents of the tome and the way it is laid out. This is followed followed by a table of the items in the volume, with hyperlinks to the discussion of the author in the list of authors. Some of the items also contain notes about the work listed. The bottom of the page contains, or will contain, the formal metadata that will appear in the left-hand column of ‘Mirador’, the Havard University Library’s page delivery service.

The lists of titles and authors are derived from the listing in the HOLLIS catalogue and the index that appears at the beginning of each physical volume except the first. Because we did not read every page, it is possible that there are items in the tome that we have missed. We did, however, look for headings on each page. We normalized the Latin of the titles somewhat, extending normal abbreviations, making the use of i and j and of majuscule letters consistent, and removing the name of the author when it appears in the title. The HOLLIS title is noted only if it differs in substance from what we offer or if it contains an error.

The notes that accompany some of the items are not systematic. We added a brief comment about the work, if we were aware that something had been said about it in the literature, or if we thought we had something to say about it. We tried to indicate where doubts had been expressed about whether the listed author in fact wrote the work. In all cases, we pointed out errors in the HOLLIS catalogue. In a few cases, we added some guidance (or questions) about the meaning of the title.

We numbered the items in the lists of titles and authors. Numbering the items in the TUI is not an exact science. We erred on the side of inclusion, relying on what seemed to be a separate heading (as opposed to a subheading) in the tome. In the process, we picked up a number of items that are not included in the indices at the beginning of the physical volumes, though most of these seem to be additions to or subheadings of works that the indexer had already listed.

The list of titles authors is followed by the metadata proper for each volume, a list of each image hyperlinked to the diplay of the image in Mirador, with its folio number, if any, and the label that is used in Mirador. This is useful for looking for the various indices that are in the tome, for getting a visual sense of how long each item is, for looking up specific references to folios, and for seeing how the physical volumes are set up technically.

The lists of authors and titles are complete in what might be called a ‘first edition’ for tomes 1–4, and the result is incorporated in the labels that appear on the left side of Mirador. Those for tomes 5–18 lack the introduction, most of the notes, and the metadata proper.

Bibliographical Abbreviations. The following abbreviations are used in the list of authors and throughout: DGI = Dizionario Biografico dei Giuristi Italiani (XII – XX Secolo), ed. Italo Birocchi, et al., 2 vols. (Bologna 2013); DBI = Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 79 vols. to date (1960- ) (we used the online edition and hence do not include the page numbers unless we found the reference elswhere); Jöcher = C. G. Jöcher, Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1750–1751); Lange, Glossatoren = Hermann Lange, Römisches Recht im Mittelalter: 1 Die Glossatoren (München 1997); Lange/Kriechbaum, Kommentatoren = Hermann Lange, Maximiliane Kriechbaum, Römisches Recht im Mittelalter: 2 Die Kommentatoren (München 2007); s.n. = sub nomine (used when the cited source does not list the author in the way that we have). Abbreviations peculiar to the list of authors are given in the introduction to that list.

Other Abbreviations. The following abbreviations are used in the lists of titles and authors: HOLAU = the name of the author as it appears in the HOLLIS catalogue; HOLTI = the title of the work as it appears in the HOLLIS catalogue (given only in the notes and only if it is substantially different from the title in TUI 1584); TUIAU = the name of the author as it appears on the title page of TUI 1584; TUITI = the title of the work as it appears on the title page of TUI 1584; HN = HOLLIS number; Vol = volume (tome) in TUI 1584; Fol = the folio number in TUI 1584; Seq = the sequence number in the PDS (hyperlinked to the page).

Other Means of Access. Pending the completion of the metadata, we attach two tables derived from the 630 items analyzed in the HOLLIS catalogue. The first gives alphabetically the author and title of all 630 works. The second arranges the authors and titles by tome and part number. (The three items that were not given volume or part number appear at the end.) An index listing the tomes and parts with links to the Harvard University Library’s Page Delivery Service (PDS, now called ‘Mirador’) may be found here. A remarkable Dutch website used to list all of the authors that are found in the Index auctorum ominium that appears at the beginning of our physical volume 1 and to cross-reference them by their Christian names. The website may still be there, but if it is, it is buried in a Dutch cloud storage site to which we have been unable to obtain access. What remains publicly available is a pretty pale reflection of what there once was.

 

 

This page last updated 03/05/18. Contact Rosemary Spang with comments.
URL: http://www.law.harvard.edu /digital/TUI1584/TUI1584Metadata.html.
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