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JURISPRUDENCE OF THE BAROQUE. A CENSUS OF SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ITALIAN LEGAL IMPRINTS. Compiled by Douglas J Osler Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann (www.klostermann.de), Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte vols 235-237 (Bibliographica Iuridica vols 4-6), 2009. Vol 235 (A-G). lv + 848 pp. ISBN 9783465036012. €169. Vol 236 (H-S). xxix + 831 pp. ISBN 9783465036043. €164. Vol 237 (T-Z). xxix + 735 pp + CD. ISBN 9783465036050. €149.

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorLaura Beck Varela
Pages175-178
Date01 January 2010
DOI10.3366/E1364980909001206
Published date01 January 2010

In his foreword to the now classic Livres, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle, Henri-Jean Martin remembers how, while working as a young librarian, he walked through the corridors of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris always fetching the very same books. Puzzled, he noticed that the readers repeatedly requested the same limited set of titles, while literally thousands of other volumes rested undisturbed in silence along kilometres of untouched shelves. What was the history of those forgotten books, and what was the role of those books in history? This is one of the questions that motivated Martin's first writings, which count today among the cornerstones of the history of the book – a flourishing and well-established discipline devoted to a better understanding of the role of the printing press in early modern Europe and beyond.

The monumental Jurisprudence of the Baroque – A Census of Seventeenth Century Italian Legal Imprints, compiled by Douglas J Osler, also invites us for a walk through the forgotten corridors of the libraries of early modern lawyers. Although the preface modestly states that this is only a first attempt to compile the editions of the juridical works published in Italy between 1601 and 1700, the three bulky volumes are anything but modest in covering no fewer than 7730 entries and more than 1000 authors, portraying an entire century of legal printing in the territories of the Italian peninsula. It is one of the first fruits and major achievements of a hugely ambitious long-term bibliographical project undertaken by Osler at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main, intended to provide an unprecedented and exhaustive panorama of early modern juristic writing and the production of law books in Continental Europe from the very beginnings of printing all the way up to 1800 (see the general presentation of the project at www.mpier.uni-frankfurt.de). The guiding principles of this project were first presented some twenty years ago in a series of articles, in which Osler trenchantly criticised the inadequate treatment of early modern printed sources by European legal historians and the dangerous consequences of working under the old assumption of the “fixity” of the printed world, especially when dealing with early legal humanists’ editions. Now he is able to begin to present systematically the evidence for his alternative view.

An important step towards the accomplishment of this huge...

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