Definition
A Latin phrase meaning literally "from the hands" or "by the hands." In historical legal and administrative usage, a manibus referred to a secretary or scribe who wrote on behalf of a superior — most specifically, an officer whose function was to write documents in the name of the emperor or a sovereign authority. The term is functionally equivalent to amanuensis: one who writes at the dictation or direction of another.
Why It Matters in Research
A manibus appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern legal sources that deal with imperial administration, chancery practice, or ecclesiastical governance. Researchers encountering the term in historical documents should treat it as a designation of office, not a legal doctrine or procedural term. It identifies an individual's role in document production rather than any substantive legal concept.
The significance for corpus research is indirect but real: when a document is identified as written a manibus of a particular officer, it raises questions of authentication, authority, and attribution that matter in historical legal proceedings. Who held the pen was not merely a clerical detail — in chancery and imperial practice, the identity and authority of the scribe could bear on the validity or solemnity of the instrument.
Researchers working in Roman law, canon law, or medieval administrative records should note that the term clusters with related Latin designations of scribal and secretarial office. It will appear in Latin-language source documents more often than in English legal treatises, and is unlikely to surface in common law materials outside of scholarly commentary on Roman or imperial practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry in the Law Mind corpus for this term. Burrill defines it concisely: an officer who wrote for the emperor, "whose hand (manus) was used for writing," citing Calvin's Lexicon (Calvini Lexicon Juridicum) as his source. This is a narrow, accurate treatment of the term. Burrill does not attempt to give it a common law application, which is appropriate — the term had no meaningful migration into English legal practice.
Calvin's Lexicon, the original source Burrill cites, was a standard reference for Latin legal and civil law terminology in the early modern period, and its treatment of Roman administrative vocabulary is generally reliable for definitional purposes. Researchers who need deeper context for a manibus in Roman imperial administration will need to look beyond law dictionaries to historical scholarship on chancery and secretarial offices.
No other standard historical law dictionaries in common use — Black's, Bouvier's, Tomlin's — appear to have carried a separate entry for this term, which underscores its status as a term of historical curiosity rather than operative legal doctrine.