The commentaries on the printed margins of Roman law and canon law will be the research focus of Dr. Piotr Alexandrowicz's team from the AMU Faculty of Law and Administration. The researcher has just been awarded a prestigious ERC Starting Grant for the project "Petrification of ius commune through printed paratexts" (acronym PetrIUS), allocated by the European Research Council.
- "Commenting on texts is one of the primary tools for their interpretation in our culture," says Dr. Piotr Alexandrowicz. - "The matter is no different with legal texts, often written in specific jargon and not understandable to non-specialists. It has been this way for centuries hence, commenting on legal texts is a practice with a centuries-old tradition. Among the simplest and most effective forms of commentary is to place it adjacent to the normative text in the form of marginalia. It came about in this manner in the Middle Ages when Roman law, codified in the sixth century, was reinterpreted and updated using glosses. The dynamics of these processes in medieval manuscripts has been studied and analyzed for years," the grant winner adds.
Thus, the researcher decided to analyze printed marginalia. According to him, after the discovery of printing, the same law texts were still prevalent - only theological books were printed more often than legal prints. Among the most significant legal prints, two collections of laws - Roman law and canon law - should be mentioned. Even in their printed versions, they were accompanied by marginalia however, these marginals, unlike medieval manuscript supplements, never aroused the interest of scholars.
- "It is these printed legal marginalia that will be the focus of our attention, and we laboriously refer to them in our project as "paratexts," i.e. anything that accompanies the main normative text," says Dr. Piotr Alexandrowicz.
Dr. Piotr Alexandrowicz adds that the printed legal marginalia bears witness to the dynamic development of cooperation between publishers, printers and editors, while technological innovations in the printing world offered new opportunities for the growth of the external form of the marginalia themselves.
- "By studying creative approaches to printed paratexts, we may better understand the extent to which they served in the application of the law, whether they were helpful in legal education, whether they served to consolidate leading interpretations of normative texts. The dynamics of these processes, the relationships between their participants and the impact of paratexts are either not known or hardly known. One of our hypotheses also provided the foundation for the project's title and acronym: we want to investigate whether paratexts have led to the petrification of leading legal interpretations. Hence, we named the project PetrIUS: "Printed paratexts as a tool for petrification of the ius commune," says the researcher. He adds: - "We will examine paratexts using various methods. Among other things, we intend to use tools supporting natural language processing to quickly and efficiently compare thousands of paratexts, track their evolution and look for references to them in the legal literature of the time. We hope our results will be useful to legal historians, in addition to all those studying old prints with marginalia. Besides the results potentially relevant to legal history, we will also develop tools that have the potential for application in other areas of digital humanities. Furthermore, we want to explore paratexts also as legal communication tools. A better understanding of early modern printed legal marginalia might provide an origin of inspiration for modern lawyers and legislators, as the paratextual aspect of normative texts has not only not lost its relevance, but is constantly gaining it," emphasizes Dr. Piotr Alexandrowicz.
Dr. Piotr Alexandrowicz is an assistant professor at the AMU Faculty of Law and Administration. He defended his PhD in legal history at the same university in 2019 with a thesis on the canonist argumentation for freedom of contract and its impact on Western legal tradition. Previously, he completed law and theology (2015, at AMU as part of interdisciplinary studies) and canon law (2017, at UKSW). He has published notably on the reception of Roman law in medieval canon law on early modern comparative law and summaries in the printed Decretals of Gregory IX. He managed projects financed by the Diamond Grant of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the Prelude, Sonatina and Sonata competitions of the Polish National Science Center. He also received, among other awards, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung Fellowship (2023), the FNP Start Fellowship (2021) and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education Fellowship for Outstanding Young Scientists (2023), and several scientific honours, including the Robert Feenstra Award for the best article published in 2020-2022 in the leading historical-legal journal Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis.
The European Research Council (ERC) supports innovative ideas in all areas of knowledge. Research must be cognitive, pioneering, and transcend current frontiers of expertise. Interdisciplinary, high-risk scientific projects that lead to breakthrough results are especially valued. Funding is provided for both basic and applied research.
The ERC funds several research grants, including the ERC Starting Grant for early-career researchers between 2 and 7 years post-doctoral: up to €1.5 million for a project lasting up to 5 years.
Photo by Paulina Szeszuła-Wojciechowska