La legge che dio trasmise a Mosè

Fortuna medioevale di un’operetta volgare

Abstract

Even today the authorship and the date of the Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum or Lex Dei continues to be debated. It has often been maintained that the author intended to convince a pagan readership of both the authoritative character and the historical priority of the Mosaiclaw over thelaw of Rome. An older thesis, however, maintained that the function of the work was to make available a text which would be useful to bishops of the ancient Christian communities in their function as judges. A similar need is effectively documented in the post-Constantinian Church. The writing of the Collatio, in substance, could represent an attempt to integrate Roman legal culture into Christianity.
Whatever may have been the origin of this vulgar legal work, no less interesting – albeit less researched – is the problem of the fortune of the Lex Dei in the Middle Ages. One may ask precisely for what reasons and according to what means a text of this sort could have a different fortune from that experienced, for example, by the Fragmenta Vaticana, and yet could still return to circulate after more than four centuries of apparent oblivion.
The manuscript tradition of the Collatio is entirely medieval. The three manuscripts which have survived are all datable between the ninth and eleventh century. In addition, medieval texts are not lacking which offer significant confirmation of the knowledge of this text throughout that period. More or less literal citations of the LD emerge in canonistic texts from the ninth century onwards. One can even advance the hypothesis that, before the Bolognese »renaissance« elevated the Justinianic texts above all other Roman legal writings, the mysterious Pepo may have had knowledge of the Collatio.