ACCURSIO, FRANCESCO. - Glossator, b. at Bagnolo Fiorentino in 1184, d. at Florence in 1263. Of humble origin, he studied at Bologna, where his teachers were Azzone and Iacopo Balduini. There he professed law from 1212 to 1253. Having moved to Florence, perhaps driven out of Bologna because he was a Ghibelline, he was appointed judge and assessor of the podestà. His body was later transported to the church of St. Francis in Bologna.

His fame, more than to special treatises on legal matters, such as the De arbitris, is linked to the Magna glossa, which is a continuous gloss on all the parts of the Corpus iuris civilis. The merit of A. lies in having gathered together, in accordance with the aspiration of the times, the thought of the glossators who had flourished from Irnerius to his own epoch, and in having handed down to us so great a wealth of interpretations (always marked with abbreviations indicating the name of each author) of the Justinianic texts, which, otherwise, amid the fragmentary congeries of the works of the glossators, would in all likelihood have been lost.

A.'s gloss immediately enjoyed great fame. Already in the 13th century it was called the Glossa ordinaria, and it had so much influence on subsequent studies that even Cujas, after the flourishing of the school of the commentators, considered it the vademecum of the jurist. Today, a commission of Italian scholars is at work on the critical edition of A.'s true Glossa ordinaria, in order to isolate it from all the additions of later authors and editors.

Bibliography3 works

BIBL.: C. F. v. Savigny, Storia del diritto romano nel medioevo, trans. Bollati, II, Turin 1857, pp. 369-80; K. Kantorowicz, A. e la sua biblioteca, trans. Mochi Onory, in Rivista di storia del diritto italiano, 2 (1920), pp. 35-62, 193-212; P. Torelli, Per l'edizione critica della Glossa d'A. alle Istituzioni, in Rivista di storia del diritto italiano, 7 (1934), pp. 429-486.

Guiccardo Moschetti

@incollection{ec1_accursio_francesco, author = {Moschetti, Guiscardo}, title = {Accursio, francesco}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {I}, pages = {204--205}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1948}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/accursio-francesco} }

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Accursio, Francesco

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