Ulrich Zasius

Ulrich Zasius (1461-1535), whose name has always been linked with Budé and Alciato in the great triumvirate of early legal humanism, has come to be considered in some sense as the founding father of the German legal profession. This is the first full-length biography of Zasius since the classic study of Roderich von Stintzing published in 1857. The author, Steven Rowan, is a leading American Renaissance historian, who comes to his subject as an expert on the history of Freiburg, the town in which Zasius began his career as Town Clerk and in which he passed 40 years of his life as jurist and administrator. The author leads us through the maze of Zasius' massive Opera Omnia and the surviving manuscripts to present a fascinating picture of a great legal mind at work - whether as academic teacher of law, practising jurist, or draftsman of the important law code of Freiburg of 1520.