In the course of the XIII century, but sometimes also in the previous one, the rules in force in the urban communities were gathered in a single text, the consuetudines. They mainly governed relations between individuals, the assembly statuta and the brevia of the magistrates and the people, therefore, the issues of public law.
The result of this consolidation is the statutum or, in the plural, statuta, that is, "the fundamental laws of the local community", which can also take the name of Assises, Short, Chapters, Constitutions, Orders, etc.
Like ordinary citizens, even the corporations of arts and crafts, brotherhoods, castles and rural communities provide themselves with their own statutes, drawing up their own laws, which were valid only within their own communities, and distinguished from the ius commune, the laws applicable throughout Europe, made up of the Corpus Iuris Civilis of Emperor Justinian, reworked by glossators and commentators, and by canon law.
The Social Sciences Library has a rich collection of statutes and consuetudines in the antique editions, available for consultation on the dedicated webpage Iura Propria: gli statuti a stampa (1475-1799) della Biblioteca di Scienze sociali.
Each statute of the collection is briefly described and illustrated by images, with indexed cards by location, type of institution, title, geographical area, and can be searched by keywords.
