PROLOGUE

More than twenty years have passed since we published in Dutch an introduction to the foresta selvatica of the medieval learned law. A German edition followed in 1992, and the book is still in print. During the years that have passed, however, an important number of new developments have taken place, specifically the expansion of the number and quality of the bibliographical tools available. This expansion is due partly to the appearance of a great number of new important books and partly to the growth of the internet. We will discuss these bibliographical tools more fully, but before doing so we will mention a few useful websites.

Websites

There exist nowadays a number of very useful websites. For Roman law by far the best portal is www.iuscivile.com, maintained by the Glasgow scholar Ernest Metz ger. It not only includes a directory of historians of ancient law (which is useful in itself), but also a unique collection of links to sources of Roman law (in the proper sense of the word: le droit romain romain) available on-line, and a list of emendations to the Watson-edited translation of the Digest.

The most comprehensive set of on-line Roman legal texts is maintained by Alexandr Koptev, partly on his Russian Roman law-library site, partly on the now more extensive Grenoble site. These include most of the Justinianic and pre-Justinianic texts. For the student of medieval ius commune, however, a caveat is necessary, which will be discussed more fully below.