Inscribing Knowledge in the Medieval Book

The Power of Paratexts

Rosalind Brown-Grant, Patrizia Carmassi, Gisela Drossbach, Anne D. Hedeman, Victoria Turner, Iolanda Ventura, Rosalind Brown-Grant, Patrizia Carmassi, Gisela Drossbach, Anne D. Hedeman, Victoria Turner, Iolanda Ventura

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781501513114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: History of Education
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays examines how the paratextual apparatus of medieval manuscripts both inscribes and expresses power relations between the producers and consumers of knowledge in this important period of intellectual history. It seeks to define which paratextual features – annotations, commentaries, corrections, glosses, images, prologues, rubrics, and titles – are common to manuscripts from different branches of medieval knowledge and how they function in any particular discipline. It reveals how these visual expressions of power that organize and compile thought on the written page are consciously applied, negotiated or resisted by authors, scribes, artists, patrons and readers. This collection, which brings together scholars from the history of the book, law, science, medicine, literature, art, philosophy and music, interrogates the role played by paratexts in establishing authority, constructing bodies of knowledge, promoting education, shaping reader response, and preserving or subverting tradition in medieval manuscript culture.

Part 1: Constructing Bodies of Knowledge

1 Juridical Late Medieval Paratexts and the Growth of European Jurisprudence

Mario Ascheri

Paola Maffei

Note: This chapter is based on the text Mario Ascheri wrote for the conference in Orléans. Paola Maffei is mainly responsible for the bibliography and the notes. The authors are grateful to Peter Denley for checking the English text.

First Steps

For legal historians, manuscripts and paratexts are a fascinating subject. Indeed, during the Middle Ages, most of the innovations in legal thinking were achieved through writings that can be considered as paratexts.¹ The cultural and religious debates of the tenth century led to a greater circulation of manuscripts, mainly of canon law, such as the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals,² but the urgent need to elaborate new canon law encouraged jurists to work on new compilations of texts instead of interpreting the interpretations of existing collections. Indeed, this is the period of the pre-Gratian collections,³ which were widespread in Europe at the same time as the Penitentials, which were themselves so important as an expression of popular religious feeling. The Gregorian Reform carried out by Gregory VII in the second half of the eleventh century, which dealt with the papal supremacy and the independence of the clergy,⁴ and the mass of questions that arose with the rise of feudalism and new urban developments, demanded more sophisticated thought. Roman law could help to achieve this aim and efforts of this kind were being made all over Europe at roughly the same time in countries such as England, Germany, France, and Italy.

The fierce feud between lay and ecclesiastical powers, the East–West schism of 1054 which saw the separation of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, competing contemporary elected popes, the general councils (synods that were not restricted to a single ecclesiastical province, a new event in the West), and the new contractual requirements engendered by economic development forced legal scholars to bring new ideas to their work on traditional texts. Formularia (sets of juridical formulae, models of lines and sentences useful for legal practice) probably circulated with annotations containing Roman concepts, which means that formularia began to be updated with Roman law for the use of more sophisticated iudices (judges) and notarii (notaries) – such as we encounter, for example, in Arezzo.⁵ A place like Bologna, that was easy to reach from Germany as well as from Rome and Ravenna, and that was close to the area under the domain of Matilda of Canossa, was suitable as a center for the teaching of both canon and Roman law.⁶

However, our aim here is not to discuss the problems involved in updating the old texts, even though such a discussion is certainly now needed, particularly for the period before the emergence of Bologna, as a number of recent works have emphasized.⁷ The need to go back without prejudice to the period from Carolingian times to the eleventh century is urgent, as the rich vein of research on early medieval canon law has implicitly suggested. The disproportionate attention which previous scholars have paid to the growth of Bologna needs to be historicized, being due to the ideas of legal culture of the nineteenth and part of the twentieth centuries: German scholars in particular wanted to underline the relevance of Roman law and its never-ending ability to evolve according to the needs of society through the interpretation of jurists, who embodied jurisprudentia, the legal science.⁸

New paths of research, new fields of investigation, and new interpretations of the existing data are now being offered by libraries that have only recently become accessible (such as those of Eastern Europe, since the fall of communism) and by digitization,⁹ but also through the site of the Institute of Medieval Canon Law.¹⁰ Indeed, a single manuscript can open up new worlds. One such example is the Expositio ad Librum Papiensem (ca. 1070), the learned commentary to Lombard–Carolingian law, which offers ample proof that already in the eleventh century and in the Lombard area, probably in Pavia, learned judges of Lombard courts were engaging in legal debate. Debate about various real-life cases, from which arose juridical problems, went deep into these questions and tried to find solutions also using Roman law: Roman law was deemed by judges to be a tool for helping in case of shortcomings in Lombard–Carolingian law. Even Lombard–Carolingian people, who were supposed to use their own Lombard–Carolingian law (in line with the “barbarian” principle that, wherever they were living, each ethnic group would follow its own legal tradition, a principle largely applied after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire), began to make use of Roman law. A common background in legal thinking was thus developing which, by the twelfth century, had led to the growth of a common law that was mostly of Roman origin.

A manuscript now held in Naples helps us to understand how legal texts and paratexts were used depending on the needs of society.¹¹ It preserves the above-mentioned Expositio ad Librum Papiensem (that is itself a paratext to the collection in chronological order of Lombard–Carolingian law called the Liber Papiensis), with its text attached not to the Liber Papiensis but to the so-called Lombarda (end of eleventh century), the well-known collection of Lombard–Carolingian law in systematic order arranged following a classification of subjects. The doctrinal paratext was judged to be so good that it survived as a main text! Since the original main text, that is, the Liber Papiensis, was offering Lombard–Carolingian laws in chronological order, it was dismissed by law practitioners as being less useful than the new Lombarda collection. The Lombarda was much easier to use because those laws were collected by subject, but the theoretical work of the jurists, transmitted by the Expositio, was considered still to be useful.

The New World of Universities

During the medieval period, the Italian peninsula was the area where things usually happened first in the legal, intellectual, and political spheres or where some particular ways of use would begin to appear. The legal science that we think of in the Middle Ages put down deep roots in Italy during the eleventh century, a time of great intellectual dynamism. However, it rapidly became an international science, a European science, and had a long afterlife all over Europe thanks mainly to one of the most archetypal creations of the era: the university.¹² Each university had its own particular organizational features, but all, especially for law, basically adopted the same texts as objects of study and teaching.¹³ In the early twelfth century, at a time when Gratian was selecting material for his Decretum from a mass of texts of ecclesiastical, theological, and legal interest,¹⁴ learned people who would later be known as “civilians” – scholars of Roman civil law – were embarking on the task of revisiting Justinian’s Digest and Code, putting notes in their margins so as to be able to navigate such large and complex works.

Thus the first glosses made their appearance.¹⁵ While sometimes these were just single words used to indicate the core of the Roman text or to explain it in a more contemporary form of Latin, sometimes they were far more lengthy, taking the form of paratitla (short explanations prefixed to titles of the Digest or the Code, giving a summary of their contents), and allegationes (glosses indicating that other frag...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editorial Principles
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Editors
• Part 1: Constructing Bodies of Knowledge
• Part 2: Negotiating Tradition, Creating Practice
• Part 3: Framing Knowledge, Empowering Readers
• Part 4: Appropriating Tradition, Expressing Ownership, Embodying the Book
• List of Manuscripts and Early Printed Editions Cited
• Bibliography
• Index