Lombard Law-books in the Long-Eleventh Century

Lombard law-books were produced and used throughout the long eleventh century, demonstrating their continuing historical and legal significance well beyond the end of the period of Lombard rule (568-774 CE). I propose to link the developments in the history of the early medieval Lombard laws with scribal practices and book production during the long eleventh century. I shall combine methodologies developed in social history and comparative legal history with codicology and palaeography. This project will investigate the development of the Liber legis langobardorum, a collection of Lombard, Frankish and Saxon legal texts, in its eight surviving manuscript witnesses. Through examination of the materiality, mise-en-page (the presentation of texts and other items on the page) and the adaptation of the laws throughout the eleventh century, I shall reconstruct the social contexts and legal understanding of the scribes and readers of the law-books. Following the codicological and palaeographical analysis of the manuscripts and comparative study of the corpus, the development of the mise-en-page and strategies to facilitate reader access to the laws will be expanded through focused case-studies. In the first case study I shall examine the laws of Liutprand, promulgated in multiple phases during his reign from 712 to 740 CE. The second case-study will be used to analyse the capitularies of Charlemagne relating to Italy included in the Liber legis langobardorum compilation. I shall evaluate how the jurists throughout the eleventh century employed books and texts to study and redefine the Lombard, Frankish and Saxon laws, and how this influenced the literate, legal cultures of Italy and north-western Europe.

I explored the book culture of Lombardist legal studies through a detailed study of seven law-books produced in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Each law-book contains a copy of the Liber Papiensis, a redaction of the early medieval Lombard laws dating to the end of the tenth century. My research has focused on the ways in which the law-books were developed and used in the High Middle Ages. By far the most important result of the research project was the discovery that, of the seven manuscripts of the Liber Papiensis, five were demonstrably produced as a pair of semi-independent volumes that only became united into a single volume at some point subsequent to their initial production. Only one of the law-book was demonstrably produced as a unified book from the outset. I have explored how this material form of the books impacted on the way in which they were used, and what it can tell us about legal literacy in the period. Close attention was given to the ways in which the peritext and layout (mise-en-page) of the laws were utilised to facilitate and direct the imagined readers interaction with the content. In turn, this allowed a manuscript-led reflection on the developing book culture of the Liber Papiensis and Lombardist legal scholarship in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries.