Welcome to locodi.ch! Here you can find information about the SNFS-funded research project on the Old Occitan legal text Lo codi and its translations into different languages. Lo codi, an extensive 9-book legal Summa codicis written in the 12th century entirely in Occitan, is a crucial text for the development of elaborate writing in Romance (see more details below). Our project will offer access to the text, its sources and its translations via a parallel corpus; it will collect information on the text and its linguistic and legal-historical background, and it will focus on a vertical dimension (Lo codi and its sources) as well as on a horizontal dimension (Lo codi and its translations as a comparative corpus of several medieval Romance vernaculars).
Lo codi and medieval Romance writing
Lo codi, ‘the codex’, is the Occitan name under which an extensive legal text from the 12th century written entirely in Occitan vernacular is known in the legal history and in the history of the Romance languages. The text is outstanding for several reasons: its extension, its degree of elaboration and its impact. It consists of nine books that offer a summary of the main content of the first nine books of the Latin Codex Iuris Civilis, with a total amount of approximatively 157’000 tokens in the Occitan version. The text is a didactic transformation of complex legal content and shows a language independent from the Latin models and complete sovereignty in the textual design. There exist several Occitan manuscripts of the text (the oldest one from 1163, copy of a supposed original from 1149) as well as translations into different Romance varieties and into Latin. It appears in glosses in other legal texts in the 13th century and we must suppose that it had an important impact on the reception on Roman law in Europe in the 12th and 13th century (Kabatek 2005). Lo codi used to be known mainly among legal historians; the Occitan version was edited in Zurich in the 1970s (Derrer 1974) and there exist several studies on the text and its impact (see Kabatek 2005). However, several aspects of the text have neither yet been studied satisfactorily nor are there reliable critical editions of several of the manuscripts. In the last years, various researchers are again studying aspects of the text emphasising its importance as one of the most relevant textual creations in the process of elaboration of written Romance (Duval 2018a and 2018b, Glessgen 2023, Paratte 2023, Mariotti 2023, Mariotti in press, Kabatek in press a).We believe that this is the moment for linguistic in-depth studies on two main axes concerning Lo codi: its relationship to Latin models, on the one hand, and its representation of a state of the Romance languages, on the other hand. As for its origin, it is known that the main model for Lo codi was a Latin Summa codicis known under the name Summa Trecensis (Fitting 1894), but some mentions of the relationship between both texts and some examples of analyses apart, there exists no comprehensive study comparing both texts. On the other hand, Lo codi is not only the first extensive Romance prose text but at the same time the first extensive Romance parallel text with versions in several medieval languages and varieties and allows for a linguistic study of similarities and differences between them. Both axes shall be addressed in our project, which consists of a detailed study of the relationship Summa Trecensis (and other sources) – Lo codi as well as of a comparative analysis of linguistic features of different versions.