Tradition and the Circulation of Glosses: Graphic and Didactic Networks, the Apparatus, Lecturae redactae., and Lecturae reportatae

No annotations written by the hand of twelfth-century jurists have yet been found. It is possible, however, and even probable that there are some autograph additions in the many extant copies of portions of the Corpus iuris civilis.

The copies available to us are all derived from lost originals. It often happened that as he was copying the text the copyist (usually a profes­sional scribe) modified something in the original or in the copy be­fore him. This might have happened for a number of reasons: the scribe might have been distracted; a word or a letter might have been difficult to decipher; the scribe’s changes might have been made out of ignorance; he might have deliberately chosen to make them. Often a text used as a model for copying had already been used by a number of professors who had made additions to the original gloss, either to confirm its point of view by enriching or explicating its contents or to challenge its explanation (at times with a simple contra}. In this case the glossator’s sign, for example “m.”, would be followed by a word or a phrase marked with someone else’s siglum. Should the older sign be dropped—the one, that is, identifying the author of the original gloss and placed between it and the more recent text—the authorship of the older opinions would be lost. Furthermore, when one copyist transcribed both the older and the more recent parts of a composite gloss at one time and in one hand, it became more difficult to identify its component strata.

It is less of a chore to grasp the mechanisms of collection and trans­mission at work in the glosses. A series of successive additions gave rise to “strata” or layers within a single gloss; such strata can be recon­structed along with the gloss, but they can also be traced within a network composed of many glosses. We can in fact demonstrate that some types of addition were recurrent, which means that for every text within the same grid we can identify the individual strata, date them, and locate them geographically.

This “network” was something quite distinct from the “stratum.” A “network” was a set of glosses that had not yet been cast in a defini­tive order, which means that their organization might have been for­tuitous, or it might have resulted from a natural process when a pro­fessor made annotations to express either his own thoughts or his reactions to previous networks. These networks, like the individual glosses, may have been redacti (by the professor) or reportati (by a student).

Thus a single Iectura may have given rise to two or more “graphic networks” of glosses, one of which may have been redacted by the teacher and others “reported” by two or more students. Although the contents of the various glosses may display identical or similar ele­ments, nonetheless the individual glosses may easily differ in their handwriting, their number, and their sequence simply because differ­ent minds and hands recorded them, selected among them, and docu­mented them by writing them down. I use the term “didactic net­work” to refer to a set of oral fragments of a course of lessons that were documented, hence have survived. This means that the only pos­sible documentation of a didactic network is through one or more graphic networks.

Something more complicated may have happened, however: a number of didactic networks (for example, fragments of Iecturae from different years) that originally had been documented in various graphic networks may later have been reduced to a unified text, thus creating a new “book” (codex], when a professor or a student copied them or had a scribe copy them. When this occurred the individuality of the original multiple didactic networks may have been lost since the recopied networks, now documented as a whole, formed a single new graphic network.^[121]

The apparatus was something quite different. Logically it was just the same thing as a “stratum.” In fact, it could reach back to preceding “strata,” absorb them, and reduce them to homogeneity, and then be­come itself a “stratum” in a later apparatus.

The apparatus was thus a deliberate sequence of annotations com­menting on the Ubri legates. In the apparatus each gloss had a fixed place, and their sequence was determined by the order and the num­ber of the glossae.

We have more direct evidence of a professor’s lesson in the network of glosses and more indirect evidence from the apparatus, whose na­ture as a composite work remote from direct and unmediated use in the schools is clear in the crystallization (or canonization) of the or­der, the number, and the form of the glosses that it gathered together. At times there is also evidence of the lesson in a lectura redacta (writ­ten down by the professor himself) or a lectura reportata (noted by a student). In both of these the Iectura presents a set of annotations aris­ing out of the school, created for the school, and reflecting the orality of the school lesson, as was also true of the “network.” The Iectura differed from the network in having a completeness and a continuity that were lacking in the “network,” but the Iectura lacked the personal and more thorough elaboration that became possible when a work— albeit based on teaching and done for the purposes of teaching—was composed outside of the school, as was true of the apparatus.

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