ACCURSIO, FRANCESCO. – Glossator, born in Bagnolo Fiorentino in 1184, died in Florence in 1263. Of humble origin, he studied in Bologna, where Azzone and Iacopo Balduini were his teachers. There he taught law from 1212 to 1253. Having moved to Florence, perhaps expelled from Bologna because he was a Ghibelline, he was appointed judge and assessor to the podestà. His remains were later transferred to the church of S. Francesco in Bologna.
His fame is connected less with special treatises on legal matters, such as the De arbitris, than with the Magna glossa, which is a continuous gloss on all the parts of the Corpus iuris civilis. The merit of A. lies in having collected, in accordance with the aspiration of the age, the thought of the glossators who had flourished from Irnerius to his own time, and in having handed down to us such a wealth of interpretations (always marked with sigla indicating the name of each author) of the Justinian texts, which otherwise, amid the fragmented mass of the glossators’ works, would in all probability have been lost.
A.’s gloss immediately achieved great fame. As early as the 13th century it was called the Glossa ordinaria, and it exerted such influence on subsequent studies that even Cujacius, after the flourishing of the school of commentators, regarded it as the jurist’s vademecum. Today, a commission of Italian scholars is engaged in preparing the critical edition of A.’s genuine Glossa ordinaria, in order to separate it from all the additions made by later authors and editors.