Drafts, Ordenamientos, Compilations, Glosses, and Editions in the Material History of the Book of Law in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (13th-16th centuries)

PANATERI, DANIEL ALBERTO

Unbound by Their Covers: Late Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Books in Their Global History

Brill

Lugar: Leiden; Año: 2024;

This investigation aims to analyze the ways in which format and meaning are closely related. Furthermore, I will try to demonstrate theoretically how both composition and meaning constitute a unit, and show how this unit is the key to understanding how law worked during the Spanish Middle Ages and Early Modern times. Specifically, I will study the monarchic productions of law. The central hypothesis is that the format of how rules were written down and displayed reveals a conscious attempt to produce a specific social intervention. In that sense, I reconstruct how the law was transmitted from Rome to Spain, but I will focus on Alfonso X productions as an articulating center for the lawmaking process in Castile with a specific center on the book of law.Moreover, other formats that will be analyzed in this chapter, in particular looking at the case of the gloss. In the first place, this phenomenon implies a new mise-en-page in the industry of books of law. It is also a direct product of the university and its way of studying those texts. Secondly, the gloss is the principal witness of reception. However, I will examine social reception rather than private reception, which itself is a separate subject. In order to complete this part, I will argue that the works from jurists demonstrate the need for the social application of the law. Thus, my idea is to describe the lecture of the law, how that must have been done, and the layout of the books of law. These interventions show the relationship between material production, its form, and the different human agency in complex contexts, all speaking to the creation and communication of meaning. Even more, the proper characteristics of the discourse of law make this phenomenon more complex.In order to enable a complete understanding of the conditions of production, this chapter will be divided into three parts. I will examine, firstly, the origins of the writing of law in the Spanish Middle Ages and its evolution to the early modern period and secondly, a typology of devices and an explanation of how these different material realities established different meanings and ways of reading. Finally, I will provide an analysis of the gloss and how it worked both on the reception and the transmission of the law to society. All the sections will be developed through attention to particular cases and examples, and my approach implies the possibility of theorizing from specific cases.