Tabula Picta: Painting and Writing in Medieval Law

Front Cover
University of Pennsylvania Press, Jul 13, 2011 - History - 160 pages

To whom does a painted tablet—a tabula picta—belong? To the owner of the physical piece of wood on which an image is painted? Or to the person who made the painting on that piece of wood? By extension, one might ask, who is the owner of a text? Is it the person who has written the words, or the individual who possesses the piece of parchment or slab of stone on which those words are inscribed?

In Tabula Picta Marta Madero turns to the extensive glosses and commentaries that medieval jurists dedicated to the above questions when articulating a notion of intellectual and artistic property radically different from our own. The most important goal for these legal thinkers, Madero argues, was to situate things—whatever they might be—within a logical framework that would allow for their description, categorization, and placement within a proper hierarchical order. Only juridical reasoning, they claimed, was capable of sorting out the individual elements that nature or human art had brought together in a single unit; by establishing sets of distinctions and taxonomies worthy of Borges, legal discourse sought to demonstrate that behind the deceptive immediacy of things, lie the concepts and arguments of what one might call the artifices of the concrete.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
Chapter 1 Dominium and Object Extinction
15
Chapter 2 Accessio
28
Chapter 3 Specificatio
38
Chapter 4 Form Being and Name
47
Chapter 5 Ferruminatio Adplumbatio
53
Chapter 6 Factae and Infectae
67
Chapter 7 Praevalentia
73
Chapter 10 Ornandi Causa
89
Chapter 11 Qualitas and Substantia
93
Conclusion
97
Appendixes
103
Notes
115
Bibliography
133
Index
139
Acknowledgments
143

Chapter 8 Pretium and Pretiositas
76
Chapter 9 The Part and the Whole
84
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Tabula Picta: Painting and Writing in Medieval Law
Marta Madero
Limited preview - 2010

Common terms and phrases

accessio according Alberico de Rosate alia alluvium applies auro autem Baldus de Ubaldi Bartolo da Sassoferrato belongs bodies Bologna cedere Cennino Cennini charta colors commentary writers construction timber contrary corpora criterion cuius dicitur diritto dominium dominus eius elements enim etiam example excerpt facta factum ferruminatio forma gloss and commentary gold Ibid idem imago infecta issue Johannes Trithemius Justinian libri libros logic Maffei material medieval jurists membrana mixed mulsum object Odofredo ordinary gloss ornandi owner painter painting and writing parchment pars pictores pictura Placentin potest pretiositas pretium principle quae quam quia quod Rainiero rationale relationship Roman law scribe scriptura secundum sicut silver sine sint siue species specificatio statue substance substantia Summa sunt tabula picta tamen things totum tunc Turin union unum vnde whole Witelo word writing and painting

About the author (2011)

Marta Madero is Professor of Medieval History at Universidad Nacional de Gerneral Sarmiento in Argentina.

Bibliographic information

TitleTabula Picta: Painting and Writing in Medieval Law
Material Texts
AuthorMarta Madero
Translated byMonique Dascha Inciarte, Roland David Valayre
ContributorRoger Chartier
PublisherUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, 2011
ISBN0812205871, 9780812205879
Length160 pages
Subjects ›  › 

History / Europe / Medieval
  
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