On 16-17 September, an international conference on legal manuscripts organized by Stefan Esders (Berlin), Shigeto Kikuchi (Tokyo), Karl Ubl (Cologne) and the Capitularia team will take place in Cologne:
Legal manuscripts in the Frankish world and the transformation of early medieval legal cultures (8th-11th centuries).
This is the second part of the final conference of the Japanese-German project “Legal Culture(s) in the Frankish World”, with the first part having taken place in Tokyo earlier this year. As part of the project, regular workshops on selected, preferably illustrated legal manuscripts have been held over the past four years, at which specialists in legal and art history have exchanged ideas.
The codicological turn has been a game-changer in studying early medieval legal cultures over the past 40 years. The pioneering work of Hubert Mordek, Rosamond McKitterick, and others has shown that legal manuscripts were unique collections of texts, sometimes fragmentary and marred by scribal errors, but always connected to specific interests and local production conditions. This shift has led historians to turn from studying texts presented in critical editions to studying texts transmitted in manuscripts. The enormous increase in digitized manuscripts has further reinforced this “whole-book approach” in recent years. Today, it is no longer possible to conduct research into the legal history of the early Middle Ages while ignoring where and when individual manuscripts were created and transmitted.
Registration for on-site participation is now open via https://events.gwdg.de/event/846/. Please check this site for further information, such as the conference programme and venues.
We are looking forward to welcoming you in Cologne!