GRADENWITZ, OTTO. - Jurist, born at Breslavia on 16 May 1860, died at Heidelberg on 7 July 1935.
He was professor of Roman law, first extraordinary professor at Berlin in 1890, whence he moved to Königsberg (1895), then to Strasbourg (1907), and finally to Heidelberg, where he taught until 1928. He was the one who succeeded in source criticism, reconnecting with what Cuiacio and Fabro had done; and, because of the time when it appeared (1887), at the height of the flourishing of Pandectist scholarship, his work Die Interpolationen in den Pundekten is the work of a precursor (v. INTERPOLAZIONI). In him textual criticism had a most acute and extraordinarily versatile investigator, who applied the method of decomposition to Justinianic and Theodosian legal texts, republican laws, the Rule of St Benedict, and the writings of Bismarck. He was responsible for the impetus given to the Vocabularium iurisprudensiae romanae; his personal labour produced the Heidelberger Index zum Theodosianus (1925; V. CODEX THEODOSIANUS), the index of the Theodosian and post-Theodosian Novelle; and the Laterculi vocum latinarum (1904), a double index of the entire Latin vocabulary in direct and reverse alphabetical order.
He also edited Bruna’s Fontes iuris romani antiqui, enriching it with indexes; and wrote an Einführung in die Papyruskunde (Leipzig 1900), still usefully consulted.
Rodolfo Danieli
GRADI: a) academic: V. BACCELLIERE, BACCELLIERATO; LAUREA; LICENZA; b) hierarchical: V. POTERE, DIVISIONE del; c) of kinship: V. AFFINITÀ; CONSANGUINEITÀ.