ALBERIC OF ROSATE

Italian jurist; b. Rosciate, near Bergamo, Italy, 1290; d. Bergamo, Sept. 14, 1360. He was descended from a family of judges and notaries, and he studied law in Padua under Oldradus de Ponte and Richard Malombra. After returning to Bergamo in the second decade of 1300, he practiced law and continued to cultivate juridical and literary studies, though it appears he never taught. He was one of the principal exponents of the Italian juridical school of commentators at the time of its most glorious flourishing and was the promoter of the first real lexico-graphic attempt in the juridical field. In his Quaestiones statutorum, which had several reprints, he left a fundamental work in statutory legislation, and perhaps the first doctrinal treatise on private international law. His contemporaries and posterity described him as summus practicus; he wrote commentaries on various parts of Justinian's Digest and Code. The influence of the De regulis iuris, included in the Liber Sextus of Boniface VIII, is clearly evident in Alberic's commentary on title De regulis iuris of the Digesta (Corpus iuris civilis, Digesta, ed. T. Mommsen and P. Krueger [Berlin 1928] 50.17). His Dictionarium iuris, which was reprinted several times, is the first ample lexicon of civil and canon law. Finally, he revised in Latin the commentary of Jacopus della Lana to Dante's Comedy (the work is not edited).

Bibliography: g. cremaschi, "Contributo alla biografia di Alberico da Rosciate," Bergomum 30 (1956) 3–102. g. billanovich, "Epitafio, libri e amici di Alberico da Rosciate," Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 3 (1960) 251–261.

[r. abbondanza]