ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the life and work of Contardo Ferrini (1859–1902), a scholar of great originality and deep spirituality, who belonged to an outstanding generation of Italian legal historians of antiquity. A patriotic man, he contributed in such a way that the study of Roman law achieved worldwide eminence in the newly created Kingdom of Italy. Ferrini deeply understood that law and love are not opposed, and that the reduction of the concept of law to merely positive law was a cultural error. A distinguished publisher of sources from antiquity, he translated into Latin the Paraphrasis of Theophilos and from the Syriac the Syro-Roman Law Book, and he enriched with a supplement Heimbach’s edition of the Basilika. He published in collaboration with Italian colleagues the so-called Digesto milanese. His treatises include a handbook on Roman criminal law and the Handbook of Pandects, among others. A man of intense spirituality and deep love of nature and the poor, he became, with his beatification in 1947, the Roman Catholic Church’s model of a Catholic scholar.
