The Lectum of Authoritative Texts

From the start, the academic lesson for students of civil law was a Iectuva (reading) of one of the codices (books) in which Justinian’s legislative texts had been collected, following an organization into the five parts, or volumina (volumes), that had become traditional from the twelfth century.

Although all the sections of the Corpus iuris civilis were considered of an equal importance, they nonetheless came to be used in quite different ways. TheInstitutes and the first nine books of the Code were used intensively in the early twelfth century, but toward the end of that century the Institutes became less central (until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when they regained a part of their former impor­tance).

The first of the three volumina into which the Digest was divided emerged as a major text, usually to accompany the first nine books of the Code. This meant that students in the schools had an opportunity to follow Iecturae on the Digestum vetus and the Code but were less likely to have occasion to attend Iectuvae on the Infortiatum, the Di­gestum novum, the Institutes, the Tres Hbri (the last three books of the Code}, or the Novels. In the manuscript volumina (which were codices in the modern sense of “books”), Justinian’s laws were usually written in a large hand and arranged in two columns that occupied only the central part of the page. This not only made them easier to read but also left ample space in all the margins—side, top, and bottom—for annotations.

In the classroom the students crowded around the professor, who sat (at least until the last years of the twelfth century) at the center of the room. The professor had before him a lectern or table on which the book of the laws was placed, a position that in theory enabled all the students (but in reality, given their number, only a few of them) to read the text along with their master.

For many decades both professor and students spoke in the class­room: the professor posed the problems, at times following an out­line, and the students responded, debating among themselves or with the master or offering objections to the way in which the problems were put or to the solutions proposed.

The “degree program” had no time limit. Anyone who wanted to do so could continue his studies for years until he felt he had learned enough. He would start again from the beginning year after year, studying the same book, each time finding some of his old compan­ions in the classroom but also younger, newly arrived, timid, and in­experienced novelli auditores.

Some students ended their curriculum with an examination in the cathedral, though that exercise was not yet subject to specific regula­tion. Others managed to grasp little and attended a school for only a short time. John of Salisbury said that they stayed no longer than it took a chick to sprout feathers.^[120]

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