Sinnstiftungen eines Rechtsbuchs

The Lex Salica is an important and surprising Late Antique legal text. Composed in Gaul, in Latin, shortly after the end of the Western Roman Empire, and surviving in 54 early manuscripts, it has long been at the centre of debates about the nature of non-Roman or Germanic society in a period of dramatic change. This, unsurprisingly, means that it brings much historiographical baggage with it. From one side, German legal history was long dominated by a (now problematic) interest in determining the origins and original principles of Germanic law, notably with the Lex Salica’s controversial modern editor Karl August Eckhardt. Meanwhile, the value of early medieval law has been challenged in grand narratives in which law as an ordered and institutional body is claimed to emerge only in the twelfth century, as Europe emerged from the violent, disordered darkness historians of the period after 1100 tend to imagine for it. Karl Ubl’s immensely welcome and meticulous study is an effort to unpick much of that baggage on both sides and to look at the Lex Salica afresh, providing a Kulturgeschichte that explores the evolution of Frankish law from its creation to the ninth century.

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• Introduction The transformation of law in the late and post‐Roman world

  Open Access•Conrad Leyser•Early Medieval Europe•2019

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