JUSTINIAN

£3,950 · Offered by Sokol Books

A very good, well-margined editio princeps of Emperor Justinian s Constitutiones Novellae , one of the milestones in the history of Western European legal systems. Justinian I (482-565) ruled for forty years over the Byzantine empire and succeeded in temporarily rekindling the former splendour of Rome by reclaiming Italy, Dalmatia and Spain from the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. He is best known for the Corpus iuris civilis including the Codex Justinianum , the Digesta or Pandectae , the Institutiones and the Novellae Constitutiones a compendium of all the decrees passed by Roman emperors, which became the official reference work on civil law after the year 529. The editio princeps contains the 168 Novellae Constitutiones , a collection of edicts passed by Justinian after the compilation of the Corpus and later incorporated into it. Whilst the Latin text appeared in print in 1476, the Greek drawn from the C14 Codex Laurentianus preserved at the Medici Library was not published (with its Latin counterpart) until 1531. Its editor, Gregorius Haloander (1501-31), was professor at Nuremberg and had also edited the Codex iuris civilis (Nuremberg, 1529). The Novellae cover a wide array of subjects in great depth, from laws of inheritance to mortgaging ecclesiastical property, incest and the oaths of public officials. They also show how Roman laws were applied in colonial territories, for instance, in matters relating to the Church and the inheritance of family estates in Africa. The edi

• Binding: Hardcover

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