Source Genre: Legal Collections

Rechtsbücher are collections of legal texts (leges). The earliest surviving collections of legal texts of the Middle Ages were created in the fifth century on the basis of the intensive contact between Roman, Germanic and Christian culture. Imperial Roman law of late antiquity as transmitted via the Justinian Code mixed in this process with the legal concepts of the Germanic peoples. (This can be seen, for example, in the melding of Latin and vernacular words.) It will suffice to mention a few well known manuscripts, such as Leges Visigothorum, a collection of Visigothic (West Gothic) laws, the Leges Burgundionum, the laws of the Burgundian kings Gundobad (480 - 516) and Sigismund (516 - 523), or the Lex Salica (sal = lord's house, manor). There are many problems associated with historical work on legal texts. We will address only two of them in the following, as regards a manuscript of the Sachsenspiegel ('Mirror of he Saxons').

Legal validity: One central question in scholarship concerns the effectiveness of written laws. This is just as unclear for early medieval law collections as for the legal corpus of the high and later Middle Ages. Multiple redactions: Most collections of law texts have been redacted many times in their history, such that they are often known to us in varying versions of quite different size and were valid in different forms at different times. On the manuscript: The Sachsenspiegel is the oldest German record of customary law. Our example is a copy of the legal text, which was first written down around 1122, first in Latin and then in the vernacular. The Sachsenspiegel consists of three parts: the prologues, the common law (Landrecht) and feudal law, and contains over 200 articles. This manuscript is parchment. The hand is a Gothic minuscule.
2. The Sachsenspiegel as an example of the genre