Some place the year of L’s birth around 1320, and others in 1325. The local biographer Filippo di Giovanni, using documents no longer available, reported it to be 1310. Chronological references in L’s works would suggest an even earlier year. The vicariate of Charles II, who died in 1328, was within living memory for L. Biagio da Morcone, who was a iudex until 1331, reports that he received in court a consilium by L. as sapiens, something that would be implausible for a jurist only in his early twenties. There is a well known letter that Petrarch sent to L. in 1374, in which the two speak as coevals (‘since an old man like you has taken to writing to an old man like me . . . ’, Seniles 16.1). Petrarch was born in 1304; it would be sensible to place L’s birth at about the same time.

For a long time, the false notion circulated that L. was French. This idea was first put forward by Caccialupi. It was taken up by Jean Chappuis, who in 1509 published the editio princeps of L’s greatest work, his lectura on the Tres Libri. L. is called doctor gallicus on the title-page of that edition, and is described in the dedicatory epistle, also written by Chappuis, as a native of Tolouse, doctor at Tolouse, and then a magister in the studium there. Though already corrected on the title-page of the exceedingly rare Venetian edition of 1512, Chappuis’ erroneous report nonetheless continued to circulate in the Lyon editions, and passed into the De claris legum interpretibus of Guido Panciroli. The error was repeated in French legal historiography at least until the end of the nineteenth century.

Today it is beyond dispute that L. was a native of the city of Penne in Abruzzo. Already in the seventeenth century, the Neapolitan scholar Bartholomew Chioccarello, and his student Nicholas Toppi of Abruzzo, disproved the erroneous notion of L’s French nationality from the fact that the same lectura clearly states that he was born at Penne in Abruzzo, that his training and an important part of his career took place in Naples, and that France welcomed him only relatively late, when he was working in the curia at Avignon. The epitaph on his tomb, erected by Mutius Pansa of Penne, says of L., ‘sibi aemula adscripsit Gallia’ (W. Ullmann, Medieval Idea, 8 and 207).

The historiography tells us that L. was a student of Enrico Acconzagioco and Simone da Borsano at the studium at Naples, since both are referred to in the lectura on the Tres Libri as dominus meus. Simone, however, was not teaching before 1360, and thus probably after the completion of L’s lectura. Hence, the expression dominus should not indicate the relationship between master and student, but rather – as M. Montorzi suggests – the position of Borsano at the curia at Avignon during the period in which L. worked there. As for Acconzagioco, he could not have been older than L., if, in 1382, he exercised the office of judge in the grand court of the Vicariate. It appears certain, however, that L. took the laureate rather late, when he was already a jurist and confirmed magistrate. Toppi, who claims to have seen the diploma of the laureate preserved by the family, reports that L. was proclaimed doctor only in 1345. That does not mean, however, that he finished his studies in that year. Probably he acquired his doctorate several years after the licentia if it is true that before 1331, as noted above, he was already issuing consilia iudicialia.

L. never held a university chair. He spent the duration of his career between the offices of the Kingdom and those of the curia at Avignon, passing through numerous assignments and traveling often. Passages of his works indicate that a little after 1345, L. left Naples. He returned briefly in 1348, when he had an encounter with the humanist Paulus Perusinus noted in the proemium of the lectura. He departed again shortly thereafter. He may have been an assessor in Tuscany and Umbria, and is later found at the Roman curia, where he knew the cardinal Pierre Roger, dedicatee of the commentary on the Tres Libri. Roger became Gregory XI and chose L. as his secretary. L. says so himself in the proemium of his Summaria in Valerium Maximum, a work clearly influenced by the cultural environment at Avignon. At Avignon, L. worked with Simone da Borsano and came into contact with Petrarch.

The date of his death, like that of his birth, is uncertain, but it is usually placed around 1390. If our estimate of his birth date is right, that would make him unusually old for his time. The question deserves further investigation.

His most celebrated work is the lectura or commentaria on the final three books of Justinian’s Codex (the Tres Libri). He claims to have begun the work while convalescing from the plague, in the hope that intellectual stimulation would restore his health (Ullmann, 10). Printed ten or eleven times in the sixteenth century, and closely studied by F. Calasso and W. Ullmann in the twentieth, it is a singular work in the panorama of the legal literature of the fourteenth century. L’s decision to dedicate himself to exegesis of the Tres Libri is justified in part by the attention that the juridical culture in Naples had paid to public law since the end of the thirteenth century, and in part by the tastes of the group of high magistrates and functionaries of which L. was a part. Connected to the seigneurial courts and attentive to the humanistic methods that were appearing in Italy, these jurists were attracted to the majestic model of antiquity, found in the Tres Libri: the management of the imperial fisc, the administration of public goods, the military law, and the organization of the imperial court. As we see in the proemium, the man who suggested to L. that he study the Tres Libri was the humanist scholar, Paulus Perusinus, who was also a high Angevin magistrate, a passionate student of antiquity and – according to Boccaccio – librarian to King Robert of Naples. The antiquarian tastes in Angevin Naples were also attracting other literate jurists. For example, Pietro Piccolo da Monteforte, friend and inspiration to Boccaccio, is noted with respectful affection by L. Pietro was a judge and commentator on royal law and also the author of a commentary on Valerius Maximus.

This propensity to learned analysis of the text – it could be called antiquarian – induced L. to offer reflections on his time in comparison with antiquity, thus anticipating the methods of political humanistic historiography. This is the aspect of the lectura that has most attracted historians. Ullmann saw in L’s work both an effective representation of the ‘medieval idea of law’ and of the ‘first humanistic commentary on law’. Rather like his correspondent Petrarch, L. expresses hostility toward arid dialectics (Ullmann, 19–20). The apparatus of classical authorities cited in the course of the lectura presages the great age of legal humanism, without dishonoring the authorities dear to scholasticism. L. samples non-juristic authors well known to medieval culture, like Aristotle – whose Ethics, Politics, Metaphysics and Rhetoric he cites – and he does not limit citations to Cicero to the works known to jurists, like De officiis, De legibus, De republica, and De oratore, but also refers to the Philippics and the De amicitia. Neither Seneca nor Valerius Maximus, to whom L. dedicated his last efforts, are missing. Ancient Christian literature is also well represented: Lactantius, Cassiodorus, Cyprian, John Chrysostom, Jerome, Ambrose, Orosius, and, above all, Augustine. Among the medieval philosophers he cites, above all, John of Salisbury, but also Peter of Blois, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, Alain de Lille, Aegidius Colonnus and his treatise De regimine principum, and also, obviously, Thomas Aquinas. Alongside them appear poets, prose authors, Greek and Roman historians who captivated the most advanced among the literate humanists: Hippocrates, Herodotus, Livy, Sallust, Apuleius, Josephus, Suetonius, Pliny, Solinus, Virgil, Sidonius, Horace, Terence, Ovid, Plautus, Tertullian, Sidonius, and finally Petrarch, laureatus, who is cited in at least two places. This abundance of references to non-legal culture, alongside the numerous citations of jurists, could not fail to interest later historians.

Recently, Aldo Rossi has claimed to have identified in a manuscript of the Vatican Library (Vat. lat. 1846) the personal copy written and annotated by L. of an anthology of passages of Sallust and Livy, authors to whom he makes frequent reference in the lectura.

The frequent citations of classics and the size of the work did not favor immediate proliferation. The one known manuscript, Vat. lat. 2297–2299, has the appearance of a court production, far removed from practice and probably little used. Other copies circulated, probably in France, but it cannot be said that the most important juridical work of L. had great influence on teaching or practice before the invention of the printing press. A much greater fortune awaited the lectura in the age of printing. The editio princeps, dated 15.i.1509, was printed at Paris by Jean Chappuis, the maker of the definitive edition of the Corpus iuris canonici and a great purveyor of juridical works. For the lectura of L. the Parisian edition was the beginning of a market presence that lasted the entire sixteenth century. In 1512, the lectura, with the title Commentaria, was reprinted in Venice. While correcting Chappuis’ error about L’s nationality, this edition appears not to have been connected to a manuscript tradition independent from the Parisian edition. There followed eight or nine Lyon editions. Although the large number of Lyon editions is not sufficient in itself to attest to the proliferation of the work in France, citations of the lectura in France abound in both practical literature and in the works of learned jurists. In Italy, recourse to the book was constant, especially in the kingdom of Naples, where the name of L. was also attached to additiones to royal legislation. Not all annotated editions of the Constitutiones report the additions of L., which are numerous, but many do, especially the editions of Giovanni Antonio de Nigris.

New manuscript testimony has recently emerged of L’s other great work, the commentary on the Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri IX of Valerius Maximus, an author dear to Johannes Andreae and Pietro Piccolo da Monteforte, but treated by L. with even greater depth and mastery of literary learning, a learning no doubt enhanced during his time in the papal court. Drafted around 1374, as evidenced by a mention of the recent death of Petrarch, the work is dedicated to L’s patron Gregory XI. To the pope, who was a jurist and a student of Baldus, L. offers a text marked by the convergence of the special training of a jurist, and by the new, ever-growing interests in the grammatical arts, and in particular in the history and constitution of ancient Rome. Emblematic of a new turn in the culture of the fourteenth-century jurists, the work dwells on, for example, the Roman magistracies, which it compares with those of its own time, prefiguring the interests of many humanists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

For some time, it was believed that the commentary on Valerius Maximus, which has never been printed, survived in a lone, incomplete manuscript in the library of the university of Leiden , but recently three others have appeared (see below under Manuscripts). The proemium has been edited with interesting critical notes by M. Montorzi, but only from the Leiden manuscript.

Source: E. Conte, in DGI 2.1204–1206, and W. Ullmann, Medieval Idea of Law

Entry by: CD/DJ vii.2023