Lecturae per viam quaestionum and Lecturae per viam additionum

The experience gained in the public and solemn disputation of quaestiones, an exercise that was not formally a part of regular instruc­tion, carried over into the lectura, the primary vehicle for teaching.

On certain occasions, when a famous professor gave the Iectura and reelaborated quaestiones in it, his class notes were sought after, copied, and widely circulated, as in the case of the Supleciones of Guido of Suz- zara.^[135] More often, though, we have only bits and pieces to document the fluid thought of the oral lesson; we have only an ephemeral echo (in the didactic networks) or lucid written fragments (in graphic net­works) that fixed that orally expressed thought on parchment and made it knowable outside the restricted circle of people who had the good fortune to hear the professor’s voice. Historiography calls these fragments “living texts,”^[136] not because, as formal logic might indicate, they were texts that were still inherently flexible or open to modifica­tion, but because the thought that lay behind them and gave rise to them was vital and fluid. It was also much richer, more variegated, and more complex than it would seem from the dead and fragmentary remaining documentation.

The manuscripts of both the Iibri legales (the Corpus iuris civilis) and the great church “codifications” frequently show significant traces of these cultural and didactic processes; we can analyze internal evidence of their use to reconstruct a basic line of legal thought in late-thir- teenth-and fourteenth-century Europe.^[137]

By that date the text of the civil and canon law was accompanied by a standard, or “ordinary,” apparatus. Thousands of additions (ad­ditiones) to these two sets of writings were collected and dissem­inated, incorporating and in part documenting ongoing juristic thought in continual transformation.

This was how the Iecturae per viam additionum came into being. These were Iecturae of varying length and importance whose recon­struction always raises problems because only rarely were they re­dactae by the professor who read the books of law and their accompa-

nying ordinary apparatus. They are a rich source of information, however, since they often record and summarize quaestiones and con­silia—that is, everyday cases debated in the classroom or the courts. On occasion they note repetitiones in full or in summary. The tran­scription of quaestiones and repetitiones in a Iecturaper viam additionum may not reflect the original shape and oral character of the Iectura it­self: this happened when someone who owned a codex (a book) was moved (and had enough blank space in the volume) to embellish the document with a Iectura containing quaestiones and repetitiones extra­neous to the original lesson.

ιι.