A vast list of manuscripts, mainly telling who published what on them, where and when.
Collected by a group of law students and other young
academics at the University of Leipzig
The Leipzig law students' initiative aimed at constituting a comprehensive cumulative
inventory of all manuscripts of Canon law and Roman law which have so far been
mentioned in catalogues or in legal-historical publications. It is aimed at providing
a tool to scholars, telling them who published what on which manuscript, and
where. The inexistence (up to now) of a tool of this kind has been lamented by many
scholars for a long time.
A test sample was provisionally made available online for a span of years 2002-2015.
In a first phase, the main activities aimed at manuscript
literature of Canon law, considering that summary cataloguing of Roman law
manuscripts is not as urgent - since the latter have been summarily catalogued
in recent times in the Verzeichnis der Handschriften zum römischen Recht
bis 1600, published in 1972 in four volumes by the undersigned in
collaboration with Hans van de Wouw. Data from the "Verzeichnis" shall at
a later stage be merged into the present internet data base.
The notes were mainly collected by job-seeking students who
were paid by the hour, on a four-hours-per-week base. While the students were
certainly trying their best, they could of course not be expected to have the
necessary knowledge of antiquarian legal literature. Very often a student was
only able to note that so-and-so quotes a certain manuscript on page xyz, but
was not able to note the contents of the quoted manuscript. Readers should thus
be warned that they must themselves control the correctness and completeness of
the notes! Time constraints made it absolutely impossible for the undersigned to
do this for the bulk of the work. Merely some control of plausibility was done in order to detect obvious errors. Although this means on the one hand that the
data base will necessarily remain full of errors and incomplete, there are on
the other hand many hundreds of cases in which shelf marks wrongly quoted in
literature have been corrected or updated for the data base. Furthermore, the
notes collected from different sources often correct each other. This will
become ever more frequent as the data base will grow.
It goes without saying that all comments, hints,
supplements, corrections etc. will be greatly appreciated.
Gero R. Dolezalek
g.dole@rz.uni-leipzig.de
Bibliography
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