Why a Serf is Not a Slave: Humans and Land in the Medieval Scholastic Imagination.

This article re-examines the medieval legal category of servus glebae (“serf of the soil”) in the context of the scholastic jurists’ engagement with Roman law and their influence on social change. Starting from James Q. Whitman’s call for “grand theories” in legal history, it explores how medieval legal imagination—conceived as a distinct, rational world of categories—shaped both the conceptualization and the practical realities of property and personal status. Moving beyond Marc Bloch’s dismissal of the term’s applicability to medieval serfdom, the study demonstrates that scholastic jurists deliberately distinguished between the Roman colonate and feudal servitude, framing the latter either as a personal status or as a form of real servitude over persons. Through the works of Azo and other glossators, it shows how dialectical reasoning and precise legal qualifications influenced municipal statutes, limited landlords’ powers, and supported emancipation measures such as Bologna’s Liber Paradisus (1257). The analysis situates these doctrinal developments within broader processes of the thirteenth century, including the monetization and eventual abolition of feudal rights, the emergence of dominium utile, and the consolidation of “perfect property.” Rejecting the separation of legal scholarship from social reality, the article argues that medieval jurisprudence actively structured social relations, with lasting effects on European legal thought.