Project description

State of research

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.

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