Perhaps the most enduring contribution made by Matilda to the cause of reformatio, though, would prove to be her sponsorship of Irnerius, a Bolognese jurist. His commentaries on a vast corpus of Roman legal rulings, discovered only a few years previously mouldering in an ancient library, had made accessible to the Christian West what the Islamic world had long taken for granted: an entire system of law with ambitions to cover every aspect of human existence.
