Opera omnia in quatuor tomos legitime digesta, nativo suo decori restituta, Indice locupletissimo adaucta

The complete works of the Italian jurist and scholar, here in its final edition. Competing texts of the enormous collection of work had been published in the 1570s and 1582, but this was the definitive edition.

Alciato was one of the leading exponents of legal humanism, the school of thought that arose in the Renaissance based on the reverence for Roman law, in deliberate contrast to the prevailing school of so-called "Commentators" who were committed to the practices of medieval law. The humanists preferred to trust the logic of classical Roman law and to rely on its texts. Their thinking, which was mirrored in contemporary social change and religious reform with the rise of protestantism, and which honoured antiquity and stressed the eternal principles underlying classical society, had a great influence on legal science in the longer term.

The only son of the ambassador for Milan to the Republic of Venice, Alciato was precociously intelligent: he wrote his "Paradoxa juris civilis"(published 1522), an explanation of Greek terms in Roman law, at the age of fifteen. After studying law at Pavia and Bologna, he took up professorships in France and later again in Italy. The historian De Feller described him as the first of the scholars of his age to discover how to use literary skills to expound legal lore, in contrast to earlier more barbarous expositions. Alciato also published a famous series of "Emblemata", Latin verse texts with moral themes, that began a whole genre of "emblem books" with proverb-like sayings accompanied by sometimes mysterious "emblematic" woodcut illustrations.