Movable laws? The “extra edictum” reproduction and circulation of the Leges Langobardorum in early medieval Italy

Abstract

The textual tradition of the Lombard laws is entrusted to a dozen codes and hundreds and hundreds of archival charters. If any scholar – at least since the end of the 19th century, when Friedrich Bluhme delivered the first critical edition of the corpus to the pages of the Leges series in Monumenta Germaniae Historica – has full knowledge of the first typology of transmission, the second one remains entirely to be explored in the perspective of a complete recensio. One could evoke the metaphor of the “lateral areas” of a tradition: but are the shreds of text or the broader quotations of laws that notaries insert in their documents really so peripheral? Are they not, on the contrary, faithful mirrors of the text that King Rotari and his successors made the palace scribes write? And, eventually, when, in which ways, in what contexts and for what reasons was the text of those norms transformed by the notarial formularies, welcoming (and intertwining with) contributions from different juridical traditions? What relationship, more in general, did exist between legal manuscripts and documents of practice? Through a general overview of the problem and a focus on some significant examples, the contribution aims to investigate a peculiar form of mobility: the mobility of juridical writings that circulate, are reproduced and modified according to a scheme consistent with its function.