IRNERIUS. - Bolognese jurist (11th-12th centuries). With him began, through the Studium of Bologna and the school of the glossators, the whole renewal of studies aimed at giving a second life to Roman law and at laying the doctrinal foundations of the common law.
Of I.'s life there is scant information. Thirteen documents dating between 1112 and 1125 show him as a causidicus, then as a judge, to whose learning recourse was had, among others, by Countess Matilda and the Emperor Henry V. The identification of I. with a namesake missus domini imperatoris mentioned in 1100 is hardly probable; and every attempt to date his life and his activity outside the limits indicated belongs to the realm of hypothesis.
According to the traditions reported a century after him by the chronicler Burchard of Ursperg and by the glossator Odofredus, I., at first magister in artibus, later turned to legal studies and, at the invitation of Countess Matilda, brought back to light in their genuineness the texts of Justinianic law until then neglected: primus illuminator scientiae nostrae (so Odofredus); he soon eclipsed the fame of his only predecessor Pepo, drawing to Bologna by his teaching that large concourse of students which, already in his lifetime, earned the city the epithet of docta.
Of the writings that go under I.'s name, only the glosses on the Corpus iuris civilis, and not all of them, are certainly his, and glosses partly included in the great apparatus of Accursius, partly cited by other jurists or preserved separately in manuscripts that long remained unknown. A secure attribution is often hindered by the variety of the sigla that mark the Irnerian glosses in the manuscripts and correspond to the various forms in which the name appears. The sigla G., Gar., Garn., Girn., Guar., Guarn., Var., War. belong to the original form Guarnerio; to the more recent form I., whose relations with the other have been variously explained, refer Hyr., I., Ir., Y., Yr., though not all of these are certainly exclusive to I. He, if he was not the first to gloss the Roman texts, as tradition wrongly asserted, was nevertheless the one who extended such a method of teaching to all the parts of the Corpus iuris, which he reassembled into its ancient unity thanks to the recovery of the Infortiatum (II. XXIV-XXXVIII of the Digest) and substituted for the epitomes in vogue in the early Middle Ages; above all he was the first to delve into the juridical content of those texts.
I. also played an important part in the compilation of the so-called "authenticae", extracts of Justinianic novellae inserted into the Code at the appropriate places.
It is further known that I. wrote other works, and of greater scope: a notarial formulary, a collection of quaestiones, a treatise de actionibus; all lost. The attributions to him of the Summa Infortiati, of the Brachylogus, of the Epitome exactis regibus, of the Formularium tabellionum, of the Quaestiones de iuris subtilitatibus, of the De aequitate, of the Qui de re pecuniaris, of the Summa legis Langobardorum, of the Summa codicis Trecensis, of the Summa institutum Fundobonensis, of the Liber divinarum sententiarum, are today generally rejected by criticism; they are explained by the eagerness to give a more concrete form to the almost legendary figure of him who was called lucerna iuris.
Bibliography8 works
Piero Fiorelli