De Feudis, edited by Jacques Cujas and printed by Claude Senneton
Jacques Cujas’ edition of De Feudis is the only book from the acquisition printed in Lyon. It was printed in 1566 by Claude Senneton. The work consists of different tracts covering Lombard and feudal law.
Senneton was located at the Sign of the Salamander in Lyon. Like many printers of the period, he incorporated this into his printer’s mark. Navigation within a city in the 16th century was typically done via the unique signs that businesses used, or landmarks like statues or prominent buildings. Many developed their sign by punning on their name, like the printer Mathias Apiarius (Latin for beekeeper) who employed either a beehive or a bear seeking honey from a tree as his sign. Other printers chose animals, objects, or other imagery that often derived from their heraldry or a prominent sign that was already erected near their shop.
The salamander was traditionally associated with fire as pre-modern authors often ascribed fantastic or even occult characteristics to real animals. Senneton’s depiction of the salamander in his printer’s mark as wreathed in flames resonated with the medieval view of the salamander as a symbol of endurance and integrity and its association with fire.
Gerardus Niger wrote the first book in De Feudis; Obertus de Orto wrote the second and third. The work was originally written around 1152 and it compiles Lombardic feudal laws covering how land was owned and passed down in medieval Europe. It was an important source of information regarding how people owned land and fiefs, and it was used in law schools and courts within Italy, France, and Germany. It was less known in England, however, where it had less of an impact; instead, it caused English lawyers to examine their own tenure system more critically. The fourth book consists of compiled works from various unidentified authors and the fifth book covers the constitutions of Emperors that pertained to feudalism.
Jacques Cujas was a French legal expert who edited and commented on this edition of the Consuetudines Feudorum (customs of fiefs), as the work was also known. He was of the mos gallicus (French-style) school of legal humanists which sought to reform legal education inherited from the Middle age and opposed the traditional Bartolistic method, also known as mos italicus. This new approach to legal texts used a historical and critical perspective which aimed to eliminate the changes that had been made to the texts through time since the classical period, and instead attempt to reconstruct the context within which the laws were written and codified.
Our book contains an interesting number of marks left by previous owners; the first of which is a book stamp. Instead of a bookplate, which was a paper label with a printed design affixed typically to the inside of the front cover, this owner employed a stamp which during this period was likely made from wood or metal, as rubber only started being used around the 19th-century.
The stamp depicts a rampant lion holding a sack in its paw. The name A. Benedetto Moneta is inscribed around the lion. Two books compiling the marks of ownership from Italian libraries through history by Jacopo Gelli have entries that seem to reference this stamp. Both describe the mark the same way:
“MONETA BENEDETTO (….). Doppio ovale sigilliforme entro cui: arma: di.... al leone di.... tenente con la zampa sinistra una borsa di... All’ingiro: A. Benedetto Moneta. X. 27x24. V. 1680.”
An approximate translation describes a double oval seal surrounding the heraldic image of a rampant lion holding a bag in his left paw with the name A. Benedetto Moneta surrounding it. The description notes that the stamp is a wooden engraving dated around 1680.
It appears that the A. Benedetto Moneta who once owned our book could be the same Benedetto Moneta who was a professor of Law in Florence, or perhaps related to him. Benedetto was a contemporary of Anton Maria Salvini, an Italian naturalist and classicist known for his translations of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts. Giovanni Prezziner notes in Storia del pubblico studio e delle società scientifiche e letterarie di Firenze, that around 1750 Moneta had approximately 50 students that attended his lectures. He was not only a learned jurisconsult but one of the leading men of letters within Florence. As De Feudis pertains to studying feudal law with humanist commentary supplied by Jacques Cujas, its presence within the personal library of a professor of law is unsurprising.
What is surprising is the marginalia that is also found within the pages. In two, possibly three different hands, notes in English have been written in the margins. There is a distinct lack of marginalia in Latin, the language in which the text was written, and some of the notes even indicate that the reader was not fluent in Latin or at least made note of words they did not know.
The presence of English marginalia may denote how the book travelled through the years, but without further evidence of ownership, provenance is difficult to determine. The English marginalia may alternatively indicate the owner was potentially an expatriate, although this too cannot be ascertained for certain.
There are many interesting examples of marginalia throughout the text showing how it was studied by previous readers or owners. It appears that there are at least two different hands between the notes made in ink and those made in pencil. However, there is also a potential difference in individuals between the different notes written in ink.
De Feudis does not appear in any of the libraries surveyed. As mentioned previously, it was a compilation of Lombard law which pertained to Feudal customs present on the continent and was more applicable to the laws of Italy, France, and Germany, rather than England where the libraries that were surveyed were housed. However, three other works by Cujas did appear within the PLRE.Folger database. These three books appear in the libraries of a lawyer, a scholar, and a statesman. Considering that Cujas wrote mainly on law, it seems appropriate to assume that these would be the most common types of people to have purchased or read a work of this nature.
The marginalia within our volume indicates that the text was likely used in an educational context since previous owners noted when other texts were referenced and where they could find these referenced passages for study. The evidence that it was owned by a professor of law also indicates the volume’s educational use and value.