Tome 1 of TUI 1584 is devoted to the history of law and to law in general. It bears the subtitle De iure cognoscendo et interpretando (‘On knowing and interpreting the law’). It contains a number of works of humanist jurists and gives us some sense of the methodological debates that were going on in the sixteenth century.

Before we get to the tome, there is bound with it in our copy ‘front matter’ that could have been bound separately. It begins with a separate title page for the entire series of tomes, a dedicatory epistle to Pope Gregory XIII, a brief note to the reader, and tables listing all of the authors in the tomes and all of the titles in the tomes. The signatures indicate that it was decidedly separate from tome 1: The title page, the dedicatory epistle, and note to readers are a terrnion, marked only by *2 on sig. *2r; the list of authors is a ternion, marked with **, **2, and **3; and the index of titles is a quinternion, marked by ***, ***2, ***3, ***4, and ***5. The opening signature of the tome proper has its own title page with an index of authors in the tome on the verso. It is preceded by two blank pages, probably designed as a pastedown for vol.. 1. The first signature marking is on the first marked fol., 3r: A3. The register at the end of the tome ignores the front matter, and tells us, as seems to be accurate, that the tome contains signatures A-Z, Aa-Zz, and Aaa-Eee, all of which are quaternions, except for the last which is a duernion. The signature markings in the page delivery service and below fill out what is found in the tome without distingushing between what is actually there and what we have added.

The list of titles and authors follows the format outlined in the introduction to these pages. It seems particularly unlikely that we missed any item in this tome, because we checked quite systematically for the one item which is identified to this tome in the HOLLIS catalogue, but which does not appear there. (This is listed at the end of the table.)

The heading abbreviations and the bibliographical abbreviations are the same as those used throughout these pages.

After the list of authors and titles there is another list that gives the formal ‘metadata’ of the tome.

Preliminary work on this list was done in the summer of 2013 by Dennis Mahoney and in the summer of 2014 by Shuting Lu. The Ames Foundation is grateful to both of them for their devotion to the task. Errors, which certainly exist and which are my responsibility, can be called to our attention by sending us an email.

Charles Donahue, Jr.
July, 2014