Helmut Reimitz is the Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 Professor of European History at Princeton University. His research focuses on the political, legal and social history of the Western Europe in the Early Middle Ages. He is the author of History, Frankish Identity and the Rise of Western Ethnicity, 550-850 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and co-editor of nine volumes.
Patterns of diversity: law compendia and legal pluralism in the Carolingian world
From the fifth to the tenth centuries a legal culture emerged in the Latin West that might best be characterized as legal or normative pluralism. Many of these laws and legal traditions had grown out of the late Roman world, including some of the barbarian law codes which often present a mixture of Roman and non-Roman legal norms and practices. But after the dissolution of a centralized Roman government in the Western Empire, which had included local, regional and even non-Roman laws within an imperial framework, the relationship of these laws to each other had to be defined in new ways and this ongoing work and adaptation also informed how new laws and law codes were conceptualized and codified in the following centuries. A particularly fascinating window into this learning process is the quite manifold and rich corpus of legal compendia that have come down to us from the Carolingian period. It represents the coexistence, interaction, and interdependence of a variety of legal orders and traditions. Just as importantly, these many laws began to be compiled and codified, so that a single manuscript might gather together regional adaptations of imperial Roman law, provincial Roman law, local customary laws, the laws of communities that came to live in the Roman empire (the so-called “barbarian” laws), and last but not least Christian and ecclesiastical laws. In the paper I would like to discuss some compendia from the Carolingian period and compare their specific selection and arrangement with the spectrum of possibilities available to editors and compilers at the time. The comparison shall help to illustrate that these compendia did not just have a representative function but demonstrate the urgent and intelligent work on legal frameworks and institutions and how this works reflects changing patterns and structures of legal pluralism from the time of Charlemagne to the later and post-Carolingian world.
