Raison d’être and Use of Stand-alone formulae in Early Medieval European Legal Manuscripts

Abstract

This article seeks to explore why early medieval scribes added standalone formulae (anonymized templates for charters and letters) to multiple-text manuscripts containing legal texts such as leges (‘law texts’) or capitularies. It discusses several cases, and in some of them, we can assume the scribe not only added such a formula, but modified it in an original way, because he thought of creating a collection of legal texts for his own use. This can therefore be regarded as a case of ‘writing for oneself’.