A Fresh Eye

One of the great things you experience upon returning home from rare books school, is the ability, after a an intensive week of study, to look at a collection or a project with a fresh eye and a renewed sense of vigor for the work. It is no different for me.

One of the first things I did upon my return was wander down to the RBR and take a long look at some of our oldest books: a set of the Decretales (in canon law, these are letters from the pope)from 1588 and a set of the Pandectarum, from 1590. All of these books are bound in a very rugged vellum. It may be these bindings have suffered over time, or perhaps, as materials were scarce, the vellum is a product of reuse and recycling. Thick raised bands cross the spine, and titles are hand lettered, but there are other details that these books share in common. They've been vandalized.


When I first arrived on the job here, back in February, I took a gander at these books. I wasn't expecting to find anything of this age and it was quite a surprise to see these thick books in their vellum bindings on the shelf. But more surprising still, were unmistakable marks of ownership that lead me to believe these books were all donated by the same person.


I've been researching the provenance of these volumes whenever I've had a spare minute ever since. They're uncatalogued and so, they're on my list of things to do. However, in order to move past the "do" into the "done" list I need to know a bit more about them. Finally, after checking accession and donor records I discovered the donor's name - and it turns out to be someone I've met along life's journey.


How would I know these books had come from a single donor, you might ask? What was the tip off and how were they vandalized? It was right in front of my face. The first place a librarian turns to in a book is the title page. If the title page is missing a whole realm of detective work must commence. Indeed, some title pages were missing, and others had the printer's device cut from the title page. It does make things not only unattractive, with threads loose and torn page fragments hanging in shreds, but this kind of missing and crucial information is not always easy to track down.


When I was at RBS I made sure to inquire about tracking down this information. I learned that many book history scholars, when confronted with this kind of damage, rely on Google Books as a tool. Simply deciding on a key phrase and "googling" it can often lead to the answer. I'm still working on that one. Since I don't speak or read Latin, knowing just exactly which phrase to use, and I've tried many at this point, has proven a bit difficult. Needless to say, I'm still on the case.


So, why would someone take the trouble to rip out the title page and/or cut out the printer's device, an engraved illustration that denotes which printing house printed the text? The simple answer is because they're beautiful. Title pages or printer's devices from this period are woodcuts and often quite beautiful. Many times collectors cut these attractive plates from the books, including any illustrations that may have been inside, and hung them on the walls of their personal library.


And here's something else I learned about title pages from Rare Book School - extra title pages were often printed and used as advertisements or fliers posted around town to alert potential buyers to the availability of a new work and where to purchase it. Many of us have seen, under the printer's name on old English books, a phrase similar to "under the Sign of the Unicorn." That's the printer's address. You could find the book there and purchase it from the very shop where it was printed.


Now that I have one of the mysteries about these books solved, I'll be able to add a bookplate denoting the donor and I'm one step closer to cataloging them. And by the way, I'm not blaming the donor. With a history of over 400 years behind these books there's been plenty of time for title pages and printer's devices to have been cut and ravaged along the way.


And tomorrow? I think we'll pick up a magnifying glass and take a look at all the ideas I generated for the rare book room and it's collections from my week at Rare Book School. Until then, dear readers, adieu!

The thread that runs through it

Peter Stein's article, "Justinian's Compilation: Classical Legacy and Legal Source, was a very enjoyable and engaging read. Informationally rich and well written, I found myself eagerly reading about the texts that comprise Justinian's master compilation.

As I read, it seemed I kept following a thread running through the paragraphs. A thread of separation, yet also one of unification. I picked up this thread on page 7. After the glossators of the twelfth century there came the commentators of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Chief among the commentators, who set their task as one of extracting law from the morass the glossators sought to illuminate, was Bartolus. Just as Bartolus is boiling down Justinian's concepts and generalizing the texts to make them easier to comprehend I pick up the first skein of my thread.

Stein brings this to my attention with an illustration on the conflict of law. As Stein says,"Bartolus generalizes from these texts and infers from them that the duties imposed by a contract are determined by the law of the place (italics, mine) where the contract was made, but failure to comply with the terms of a contract is to be judged by the law of the place where it should have been performed. So, we have a larger concept of law as standardized for all peoples with the empire, but that law is subject to the law of the place where the contract was made, the activity to be performed, and the conflict occurred.

After the commentators, the humanists arrived on the scene. Here too, a group of scholars part the curtain that veils the text of the law and then bring it into the open for all to see. Stein quotes Zasii Epistolae,II as describing the humanists as tearing away the commentary "like a giant creeper," and I envision Kudzu here, in order to make clear the path to the text itself. As a result, by examining the texts and discovering inaccuracies that perpetuated over time, the humanists showed that reading legal texts was akin to extracting the rule that made sense, rather than accepting the text as gospel.

As this thread weaves through the text of Stein's article it brings us further along the development of humanistic thought and into their attempt to balance the world of Justinian with that of the France of their day. In their scholarly struggles the humanists found that this was a concept they could not reconcile. In finding that the law of Justinian's day was not applicable to that of their own time, the humanists found their conflict of place. The local, if you will, once again supersedes the law of empire.

Finally we come to the end of our thread with Donellus's commentaries on the Civil Law. Taking threads from both the commentators and the humanists, Donellus's tack was to break down the larger whole into the parts, moving from a macro to a micro approach. In this too, we seem to follow the thread of moving from Roman to local, or from large and all encompassing to small and specific.

When viewing the article from this perspective it appears that each group, the glossators, the commentators, the humanists, each took an approach to a major document and brought insight that could be shared and passed to the next generation of scholars. It's a fascinating look at a text from the ancient world as it travels through the centuries. As Stein concludes, in order for Roman Law to survive as a field of study in law schools today it must not be presented in a vacuum but integrated into the society of its day. We are in the process of doing just that at WVU. We're bringing in histories of West Virginia, a state with a tumultuous past, in order to set the context for the study of state law. It's a good idea.