Early Italian Statutes: Duchy of Milan
The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library
Milan (Duchy). Constitutiones dominii mediolanen. cum ordinibus excell. Senatus (4th ed.; Novara, 1597). Acquired with the John A. Hoober Fund, April 1948.
(View the Duchy of Milan on a map: “D. di Milano”.)
Following a panegyric treatise “On the Origins of the Law of Milan” by Francisci Crassi, this volume contains the constitutions of 1541 divided into five books. Here we see the beginning of the statutes that govern the Consuls of Merchants, who had jurisdiction over “all cases turning between traders, or merchants, or their agents, and contracts between them.” It appears that the notes in the margins were made in the middle of the seventeenth century. Note the “little hand,” or manicula, at the top of page 145, used since the Middle Ages as a common way to mark important passages in the text.
BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators
“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.
