Littera Florentina

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The littera Florentina (from which the short form "Florentina"), also Codex Florentinus (Digestorum) , is a manuscript of the Digest . Legend has it that it was stolen when Amalfi was sacked. A copy of the Digest reappeared in Italy in the 9th or 10th century. Since 1406 this has been in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in the eponymous Florence and is by far the most important handwritten tradition of the digests. Your text is the basis of all medieval, modern and modern digest editions.

The handwriting

Back of sheet 287 (287v) of volume 1. The page contains the end of the 19th book, namely D. 19.5.20 to D. 19.5.26.

The littera Florentina probably dates from the 6th century and thus comes close to the creation of the digests, which were proclaimed as a code of law by the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I on December 16, 533 through the constitutions Tanta (Latin) and Δέδωκεν (Greek) . According to more recent findings it even seems possible that the manuscript originates from the process of the creation of the digests themselves.

The manuscript is a parchment codex and has 907 pages with a size of about 37 × 32 cm, which are described in two columns in scriptura continua , without spaces between the individual words and without punctuation marks (periods and commas). Different separations of words and different setting of punctuation marks can lead to different readings.

Copies of the manuscript came to Irnerius ( Wernerius ) in Bologna . He was the first to give them glossaries . After his death, his students Martinus Gosia, Bulgarus, Hugo and Jacobus continued the work, later Azo and Accursius . According to recent research, 14 scribes wrote them and 8 proofreaders improved their work. The proofreaders compared the copy not only with the copy, but also with another manuscript, so that the Florentina is based on two manuscripts. Both writers and proofreaders had a knowledge of Greek; the Florentina contains the Greek digest fragments in Greek. It is also proven that other people made improvements outside of the creation of the manuscript in late antiquity .

The manuscript does not yet contain the famous tripartite division of the digests into Digestum vetus , Infortiatum and Digestum novum , as found in the medieval Vulgate manuscripts. By dividing the manuscript into two volumes and thus two parts (D. 1-29 and D. 30-50), the script is present as separate. There is no division into paragraphs within the leges .

meaning

The importance of the littera Florentina results from the fact that it is the oldest surviving manuscript of the Digest. Theodor Mommsen , together with his colleagues E. Kießling and A. Reifferscheid, created the digest edition, which is still relevant today and which only had to be corrected in individual places, mainly due to the Florentina. Mommsen himself did not see the handwriting; rather, his employees copied it or compared it with the digest text known from the Vulgate manuscripts. In his Digest edition of 1870, Mommsen relied largely on the littera Florentina, based on the methods of textual criticism recognized at the time; so he assumed that all other manuscripts that have come down to us came from the Florentina.

Today one recognizes the paramount importance of the Florentina for the production of the digest text, but even more than Mommsen takes into account the Vulgate manuscripts (manuscripts that the jurists used in the Middle Ages and which in some cases have a better reading than the Florentina) and the Greek tradition in the basilicas . The great importance of the Florentina is also related to the question of the extent to which the flourishing of jurisprudence in Bologna in the 12th century was based on the singular event of its discovery.

The littera Florentina and the Greek tradition - The basilicas

287v with the end of the 19th book. The addendum “idem” in D. 19,5,26 can be clearly recognized.

The basilicas largely represent a translation of the Latin digests into Greek. These translations were based on other manuscripts than the Florentina, some of which have the better text. In the Florentina's writer, for example, the 19th book breaks off in D. 19.5.26 in the middle of the sentence (the AcI addition to “dicendum est” is missing). A Florentina corrector noticed the breakoff and tried to heal by adding an accusative by adding “idem” before “dicendum est”; so are the Vulgate manuscripts. The basil text B. 20,4,26 corresponding to the digest passage, however, brings a meaningful continuation of the “dicendum est”; Following Mommsen, the end of the digest title 19.5 from basilicas 20.4.26 and 20.4.27 is added today.

The littera Florentina and the Vulgate manuscripts - The model of a Codex Secundus (S)

Vulgate manuscripts ( lat vulgatus = generally known , widespread ) are those manuscripts that were used in the legal school of Bologna and by lawyers in general in the Middle Ages until the 19th century. The text of these manuscripts is not uniform; it approximates the text of the Florentina, insofar as in the course of time the Florentina was used again when copying a Vulgate manuscript by another, because its value for tradition had been recognized.

One thesis for the relationship between Vulgate manuscripts and Florentina is as follows: All Vulgate manuscripts are derived from a single manuscript. This is called Codex Secundus , although this was copied from the Florentina (Codex Secundus, because the Florentina is the Codex Primus). This codex Secundus is not an existing manuscript; nor has it been proven that it ever existed in the form of a master manuscript encompassing the entire text of the digests . The Codex Secundus is only a model that aims to explain the relationship between the Vulgate manuscripts and the Florentina. Mommsen also worked according to this model when creating his digest edition because he was able to rely primarily on one handwriting, the littera Florentina. In this way he saved himself from having to look at all the details of the tradition of the Vulgate manuscripts, of which there are hundreds. One must consider this procedure to be permissible, because a criterion for scientific work is that it has to be finished once.

One tries to justify this thesis as follows:

  1. All Vulgate manuscripts derive from the Florentina: This can be seen in spelling mistakes and rearrangements that the Vulgate manuscripts have in common with the Florentina, in particular the conversion within D. 50,17,118-200, which is caused by the displacement of a page in the Florentina or possibly theirs Template was generated. In the 2nd part of the Florentina, D. 50,17,117 (end of 471v) is followed by D. 50,17,158-199 (472), then follows D. 50,17,118-157 (473), then follows D. 50, 17,200 ff. (474r). This shift, which results simply from interchanging pages 472 and 473 of Volume 2, can also be found in the Vulgate manuscripts. This reversal can be recognized by the inscriptions, because in the text of the digests the book numbers rise above all in the titles D. 50.16 and D. 50.17 within a work, as Bluhme in particular recognized and justified. For example, BD 50,17,160, although it comes before D. 50,17,118 in the Florentina, behind D. 50,17,118, because D. 50,17,160 is an excerpt from the 76th book of Ulpian's Edict Commentary, D. 50,17,118 but from the 12th book. The interchanging of leaves 472 and 473 was only recognized by Lelio Torelli in the early modern period .
  2. The Vulgate manuscripts have a common parent manuscript: This shows errors that are common to all Vulgate manuscripts, but are not contained in the Florentina. As an example, there are relocations in the 23rd Book of Digest, which can be found in the older Vulgate manuscripts but not in the Florentina. The fact that this error can no longer be found in the more recent Vulgate manuscripts is explained by the assumption that the error was corrected in later copies by a comparison with the Florentina. The argument that in all Vulgate manuscripts the digest text is split into three parts is even stronger: 1. Digestum vetus, 2. Infortiatum, 3. Digestum novum. The Florentina, with its division into two parts, does not provide a starting point for this.
  3. The existence of a Codex Secundus can explain why the Vulgate manuscripts, although they are dependent on the Florentina, sometimes have better readings than the Florentina, which were not found by conjecture (i.e. by the mere reflection of a scribe who had noticed a mistake) could become. In the Florentina in D. 2,15,14 the sentence “id observandum de aere alieno, quod inter eos convenisset” is missing, which the Vulgate manuscripts, like the basilicas, have. Even Theodor Mommsen supplemented the text of the Florentina accordingly, although he apparently placed more emphasis on the Byzantine tradition. This finding is explained by the fact that when copying the Codex Secundus from the Florentina, a different text basis, independent of the Florentina, was used.

The evidential value of these arguments remains controversial .

Newly added principium in D. 32,93 (2nd volume 52v).
  1. All theories about the relationship between the Vulgate manuscripts and the Florentina should ultimately lead to an explanation of the question of how the tripartite digest text in the Vulgate manuscripts came about ; for the Florentina, as explained above, does not know the division into three. A sub-question to this is the names Digestum vetus, Infortiatum and Digestum novum, after the origin of the peculiar and perhaps the student's language. Both of these things already seemed to need explanation to Odofredus . Medieval number symbolism, a scribbler joke, a breakup of an originally two-volume master manuscript of the Codex S and a brief successive disclosure of the digest text in three parts are cited.
  2. It has been observed that the Vulgate manuscripts, especially in the first two parts, in the Digestum vetus and Infortiatum, have better readings than the Florentina (Jakobs 1999, p. 238). So should the relationship between the Florentina and the Vulgate manuscripts be different in the individual parts of the Digest?
  3. The thesis presented is based on the assumption that there was a single fixed digest text which Justinian promulgated on December 30, 533; all deviations from this text can only be explained by copying errors and the like. This notion has recently been called into question. For example, the Florentina scribe left out the principium in D. 32.93, the corrector added it. This could be explained by the fact that the proofreader corrected the copy using another, better handwriting. But: The text of the Florentina is editorially the better, because the decision in D. 32,93pr. can already be found in D. 32,38,4, so that the writer's text better complies with Justinian's command to avoid repetition. One possible explanation would be that both the scribe and the proofreader templates contained an equally official digest text at different editorial levels. According to Paul Krüger , the lex 38 belonged to the appendix, the lex 93 to the Papinians. In this way, it was not possible to determine the correspondence in terms of content not when excerpting, but only when looking through the title after all fragments had been included in it.

The story of the littera Florentina

The history of the manuscript itself is full of changes and can no longer be explained with certainty in detail. From an attached to D. 18,1,9,2 gloss can be because it was written in Lombard font, conclude that the Florentina was located later than the 9th or 10th century in Italy, most likely in southern Italy. At the time of the Glossators it was in Pisa . An unbelievable report from the 13th century claims that it was previously kept in Amalfi and reached Pisa in 1155 as spoils of war. In 1406 she came to Florence .

expenditure

  • Justiniani Augusti digestorum seu pandectarum codex Florentinus olim Pisanus . 10 vols. Rome 1902–1910 (photomechanical reprint)
  • Alessandro Corbino, Bernardo Santalucia (ed.): Justiniani Augusti Pandectarum codex Florentinus . Olschki, Florenz 1988. ISBN 88-222-3578-9 (photomechanical reprint)

literature

Works suitable for introduction and overview are marked with an * at the end.
  • Mario Bretone: History of Roman Law. From the beginnings to Justinian , 1st edition Munich 1992, 2nd edition 1998, pp. 255f. ISBN 3-406-44358-3 .
  • Jan Dirk Harke : Roman law. From the classical period to the modern codifications . Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-57405-4 ( floor plans of the law ), § 2 no. 5.6 (p. 23).
  • Horst Heinrich Jakobs: The great time of the glossators (review by Lange, Römisches Recht im Mittelalter). SZ 116, 1999, pp. 222-258, especially p. 229 ff.
  • Wolfgang Kaiser : Digest origin and digest tradition. For more recent research on the Bluhme masses and the new edition of the Codex Florentinus , SZ 108, 1991, pp. 330-350.
  • Wolfgang Kaiser: On the storage location of the Codex Florentinus in southern Italy. In: Frank Theisen (Ed.): Sum - Gloss - Comment. Legal and rhetorical matters in canon and law. Osnabrück 2000. ISBN 3-934005-01-2 . Pp. 95-124.
  • Wolfgang Kaiser: On the origin of the Codex Florentinus. At the same time as the Florentine Digest Manuscript as a source of knowledge for the editing of the Digest. In: Adrian Schmidt-Recla (Ed.): Saxony in the mirror of the law. Ius Commune Propriumque. Cologne 2001. ISBN 3-412-07301-6 . Pp. 39-57.
  • Wolfgang Kaiser: writers and correctors of the Codex Florentinus. SZ 118, 2001, pp. 133-219 ( online , PDF file; 3.8 MB ).
  • Hermann U. Kantorowicz : About the origin of the Digest Vulgata. Additions to Mommsen. SZ 30, 1909, 183-271 ( PDF file; 31.1 MB ) and SZ 31, 1910, pp. 14–88 ( PDF file; 26.8 MB ).
  • Hermann Lange : Roman Law in the Middle Ages. Vol. 1, Die Glossatoren, Munich 1997. ISBN 3-406-41904-6 . Pp. 61-71.
  • Juan Miquel: Mechanical errors in the transmission of the digests. SZ 80, 1963, pp. 233-286.
  • Theodor Mommsen : Praefatio to the Editio Maior of the Digesta Iustiniani Augusti . Berlin 1870 ( archive.org ) (German translation by Gisela Hillner, SZ ( magazine of the Savigny Foundation for Legal History . Romance Department, 121, 2004, pp. 396–500)).
  • Fritz Schulz : Introduction to the study of digests . Tübingen 1916. *
  • Hans Erich Troje: Ubi in libro florentino duae lectiones inveniuntur… On the history of digest editions (16-19th centuries) . In: Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis / Revue d'histoire du droit / The Legal History Review 72, 2004, pp. 61–80.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jan Dirk Harke : Roman law. From the classical period to the modern codifications . Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-57405-4 ( floor plans of the law ), § 2 no. 5.6 (p. 23).
  2. ^ Hermann Lange : Roman law in the Middle Ages. Vol. 1, Die Glossatoren, Munich 1997. ISBN 3-406-41904-6 . P. 64.
  3. ↑ Horst Heinrich Jakobs: The great time of glossators (review by Lange, Römisches Recht im Mittelalter). SZ 116, 1999, pp. 222-258, especially p. 238.
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Kaiser: On the origin of the Codex Florentinus. At the same time as the Florentine Digest Manuscript as a source of knowledge for the editing of the Digest. In: Adrian Schmidt-Recla (Ed.): Saxony in the mirror of the law. Ius Commune Propriumque. Cologne 2001. ISBN 3-412-07301-6 . Pp. 39-57.
  5. ↑ 16th edition of the Digest Edition, p. 483 fn. 1