Considerazioni su Hermann Kantorowicz filologo, 87 anni fa, le sue Textstufen e Accursio al tempo d'oggi

Abstract

The influence of Hermann Ulrich Kantorowicz as historian and philologist working on legal texts still has a significant effect on legal historians working on medieval jurists and their works. His Einführung in die Textkritik was recently published in its first Italian edition and his method of classifying authentic recensions of texts by the application of the criterion of the Textstufe has been accepted in a monograph dedicated to the Glossa ordinaria of Accursius on the Digestum vetus by H. H. Jakobs. This article tries to connect textual criticism to the material aspects of the production of texts and books and discusses the practicality of the method of Kantorowicz as applied to legal scholastic texts of the 13th century. At that time the works of the jurists were disseminated at the universities, first of all at Bologna, by means of a serial process of producing manuscripts by exemplar and pecias. The scribal practices by which the authors composed their works and revised them, also after their first publication, as well as the means of transmission of texts at the universities, raise the most critical questions in the investigation of the manuscript tradition of this kind of literature. The case of Accursius and the recent results concerning the manuscripts of his works provide the occasion to refute some theses relating to the criterion of the Textstufe and its application to the Glossae of medieval jurists.