WELL-ORGANIZED LEGAL OPINIONS

Pegas, Manoel Alvares: Resolutiones forenses practicabiles [...] pars prima [-secunda]. Ulyssipone [Lisbon] ex typographia Michaelis Deslandes 1682.

Second edition of this collection of legal opinions by Manoel Alvares Pegas (first published in 1668). It is found in library catalogues as a complete work, although from 1692 a five-volume work called the Tractatus de obligationibus was printed, advertised as in a series with the present publication.

Issues include jurisdictional problems, questions of inheritance following remarriage, the exercise of papal power, faulty contracts, and whether clerics can ever have wills. A well-organised work, it is broken into twenty thematic chapters, each containing related consilia (legal consultations), and has an eleven-page list of chapters and further guide to contents at beginning, and a 115-page index at end. The prefatory material is, very nicely, all in verse (both to and from the author). The many honours of Pegas (1635-1696) included being an advocate and judge at the Portuguese supreme court (Casa de Supplicaçaõ). He also produced a commentary on the Ordinances of the Filippines.

Details

Two vols., folio, pp. [30] 589 [2]; [4] 589-1306. With half-titles. Titles in red and black. Woodcut vignettes to title-pages, featuring palm trees and winged cherubs perhaps wearing a notion of native American head-dress. First vol. with printer's colophon featuring variation of the same. Other woodcut decorations. Slight bit of worming, overall very good copies, bound in 18th-cent. mottled sheep, spine ruled in gilt with gilt lozenges and red morocco gilt label, binding rubbed but good.

OCLC (2010) shows sets as thus at Valladolid, Biblioteca Nacional, Chile BN, Univ of Salamanca. Cf. Barbosa Machado II 176.