Proliferating Texts and the Market for Juridical Books
Irnerius5S restoration of the Justinian compilation was not the work of a scholar isolated from the world. It had profound reasons for its existence that gave it an extraordinary vitality.
We need to take a closer look at those reasons.First, however, we need to establish a few basic points. The texts that were rewritten and redistributed into five volumes began to be copied repeatedly and incessantly, and entire workshops of artisans and booksellers (stutionurii exemplu tenentes and Stutionurii Iibrorum) worked at top speed and with increasingly well coordinated and reÂfined methods to produce the numbers of copies that the market reÂquired.[56] Moreover, the market was extensive, to the point that even today libraries in Europe and North America contain some two thouÂsand copies, in whole or in part, of the various portions of the Iibri Iegules.
Every volume, or codex, of robust parchment worked and prepared for writing consisted of some two hundred folios, which means that about one hundred sheep were required to provide the raw material for one book! This made a book an expensive commodity, whose price reflected the costs of the parchment and its preparation, the cost of writing (entrusted to skilled umunuenses), and sometimes the cost of miniature, illumination, and binding, which further increased its value. A book was an inheritance, and like every legacy it was to be safeguarded, used with intelligence, and profited from.
It is impossible to think that all this occurred (Irnerius5S recovery of the Justinian text, the production of copies of it, the formation of specialized workshops, the circulation of the books, the investment of large amounts of money, and the assumption of entrepreneurial risks) only because Irnerius thought it the proper scholarly thing to do to revise and reorganize the Justinian compilation, or simply beÂcause his contemporaries and successors were stricken with a pure philological or historical interest or with a yen to possess a book.
Clearly, if their desire for knowledge had been predominantly or exÂclusively theoretical and intellectual, a professional concern for philoÂlogical studies would soon have sprung up, and the need for an accuÂrate “reading55 derived from numerous comparisons of reliable texts would have led direcdy to problems concerning the authenticity of the text. Even if this had happened, we would still have to explain the very large quantities of books that were produced—numbers that seem far superior to the needs of even a large band of scholars. But for centuries nothing occurred that we could credit to any philological or historical interest. If there was (and indeed there was) concern to give the text a “certain” form, the reasons for doing so were all internal to a new way of dealing with legal problems.Jurists, practitioners, and the professors in the schools all found a “certain” text useful: the value, validity, and reasonableness of an inÂterpretation, in the courts as in the schools, could not do without the certainty that the text contained those precise words and not others, those passages, those precepts and not others. If during a debate someone could claim to alter the text under discussion, if someone could claim to present a text that differed by as much as a single word and could base his arguments on that altered text, then debate, colloÂquy, or the exchange of contrasting points of view on an interpretaÂtion would have become useless exchanges of soliloquies.
The jurist needed a dependable text, an exemplar. This was why structures were created that offered adequate guarantees, and why particularly reliable craftsmen-merchants (stationarii exempla tenentes) were entrusted with handling exempla—that is, autograph texts or auÂthenticated copies that could be borrowed for payment of a fee.
This has nothing to do with any love for the past, nor with an admiÂration for the grandeur, the power, and the glory of Rome.
It shows no desire for or interest in historical knowledge. Historians have even noted that the literary realm in the twelfth century was characterized by an “absence of the ancient classics and of vernacular literature”[57] among the usual reading matter of cultivated men and in the curricuÂlum of the “arts.”[58] It did not matter to the jurists who returned to the laws of Justinian whether Justinian had lived before or after Christ. Fanciful anecdotes circulated in the law schools about the origin of the ccTwelve Tables” that contained the archaic laws of Rome. Thus if we read that ccRoman law originated with the Greeks, like all other sciences,”[59] we know that the passage is a stylistic flourish written by an author who had only a vague notion of Greek and Roman antiqÂuity, had little interest in improving his knowledge, and could not even understand Greek: ccGrecum est, Iegi non potest.”[60]The proliferation of codices, their diffusion and their wide circulaÂtion despite their very high individual cost were thus related to other needs. Roman laws were useful to the jurist. Why? To satisfy what needs?
Before turning to this problem and attempting an explanation, we need to look at the larger question of the norms of the church as a universal organization embracing all the fideles Christi. We shall see a parallel, if not even more striking, development in canon law, with even larger numbers of copies that were produced and put on the market (and even larger numbers that remain today).
6.
More on the topic Proliferating Texts and the Market for Juridical Books:
- Bellomo Manlio. The Common Legal Past of Europe: 1000-1800. The Catholic University of America Press,1995. — 273 p., 1995
- The work of the jurists
- The Historical Background
- France