The centre and the margins of the jungle of glossed manuscripts

What Emil Secker has called “the jungle of glossed manuscripts” is a very heterogeneous set of sources. There are sets of glosses written to accompany stabilised texts of the ius commune, with the primary purpose of facilitating a coniunctio, the linking of norms located in different parts of the corpora of civil and canon law. There are also apparatuses drawn up to accompany the texts of the ius proprium, the main purpose of which is to outline the areas of application of the norms, the textual form of which is less stabilised than that of the Roman and canonical texts adopted for school teaching. The case of the glosses to Frederick II’s Liber Augustalis illustrates these differences in practice. Scholarly access to the sources of this exegesis in the form of glosses has been difficult because of the difficulty of preparing critical editions. Now the wide availability of digital images of manuscripts could open an easier way to consultation.