The Liber Papiensis in the Long Eleventh Century

The Liber Papiensis in the Long Eleventh Century: Manuscripts, Materiality and Mise-en-page offers an in-depth, manuscript-led analysis of seven surviving law-books, produced by or in association with the flourishing Lombardist legal studies of the long eleventh-century. It centers the materiality of the laws and capitularies as fundamental for understanding how the laws were understood, the books were read and the laws might be studied. Each of the seven main chapters is dedicated to an individual manuscript and arranged—as much as paleographic dating allows—in the order of their production, from the second quarter of the eleventh century, through to the first quarter of the twelfth. While the location where most of the manuscripts remains unknown, the monograph considers them in terms of their proximity to or distance from the cutting edge of Lombardist legal studies, and how book usage varied between the center(s) and the peripheries.

Thom Gobbitt was awarded his doctorate in medieval studies from the University of Leeds in 2010, and since 2012 has been a postdoc at the Institut für Mittelalterforschung of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OEAW) in Vienna. He has researched on various projects centred on the book cultures and legal literacies of Lombard laws, Carolingian and Ottonian capitulary collections, and Lombardist legal studies. His research stands at the intersection of the History of the Law and the History of the Book, where through the framework of the materiality of Lombard law-book he explores mise-en-page and paratext, socio-legal contexts, legal imaginations and literacies and scribal strategies in re-writing the laws.