Insegnamento del diritto e trasmissione del sapere giuridico a Roma da Teoderico a Carlo Magno. La scia dei manoscritti

One and a half century after the fanciful writings of Hermann Fitting, historians are still asking themselves what happened in Italy of the enormous heritage which was left in the sixth century and through what labyrinths it re-emerged at full light, determining the renewal of medieval jurisprudence. Considering the new information we have (especially those that come from the paleographical research), it could be interesting to investigate once more the existence and the real activity of the school of Rome during the Justinian age and immediately afterwards. Equally interesting is to verify whether Rome, during the first centuries of the Middle Ages, continued to represent a reference centre for juridical culture. According to the hypothesis developed in these pages, Rome played a very important role in the centuries of the early Middle Ages not only with regard to the material conservation of the Justinian’s libri legales, but also in the first settlement of the new imperial law in the West and in the creation of an original perception of its significance. Without such settlement roots and perception, the Bolognese renovatio would really appear as a ‘miracle’ difficult to explain. Over the age of Justinian, the seventh and eighth centuries are truly the darkest in the history of Roman law in the West. By studying the medieval manuscript tradition in particular of the Institutiones and of the Novellae, however, we can gather a series of elements that help us to clarify. A little more light comes also from the manuscript tradition of the Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum. Through the spread and use of this late-antique works, we can see howe – under the action of the papacy – Rome returned to being at the end of the eighth century a centre of the world politics and – since the law follows the politics – of the legal culture.