Micro­lit­er­a­tures, 2

What do we mean by micro­lit­er­a­tures? Cre­ating a concept out of space. The medieval man­u­script as a col­lab­o­rative space. Is this a space of lit­er­ature? The insti­tution / non-institutional divide of lit­er­ature. The pro­duction of the mar­ginal space.

This is like a second intro­duction in which we are going to artic­ulate two ideas that come from Derrida: the first one is the enforce­ability of the law, the violent forces that accompany the moment in which the law is made evident; the second one, hos­pi­tality, talks about the for­eigner who asks ques­tions. Because mar­ginal writing and the writing of the law are in a position of strange hos­pi­tality and changing vio­lences, the readings for today will help us fig­uring out ways to under­stand the complex rela­tionship between center and margin.

Are lawyers allowed to perform the inter­pre­tation of the law and to find the truth with the help of non-legal dis­ci­plines? In this session we will deal with how some legal scholars and thinkers faced the question of reading and inter­preting the Law in front of other dis­ci­plines and textual arts.

The question on the tabula picta or a painted board is a civil law question on property. Property, of course, is a complex concept that implies pos­session, the char­ac­ter­istics of the physical object, whether such physical objects can hav a shared pos­session, and so on. In this case, the tabula picta pro­poses a question in which civil lawyers and mar­ginal writers ask whether the owner of a painted board is the one who painted it or the one who pro­vided the mate­rials to do it.

In the margins of the Roman Law, lawyers, scholars, and other inter­locutors inter­vened to the­orize further some prac­tices or ideas present in the central text. Among them, they the­o­rized the lin­guistic and rhetorical practice called fictio legis or legal fiction, to discuss the extent to which fic­tions should be limited or not by other insti­tu­tions, like, for instance, the insti­tution of nature.

The amount of primary sources (counting only the Middle Ages) about bib­lical law is too long even to list. For Jewish thinkers, bib­lical law (which is not the law, just one of its sources) includes the Torah, which cor­re­sponds to the first five books of the Tanakh: Bereshit (Genesis), Shemot (Exodus), Vayikra (Leviticus), Bamidbar (Numbers), and Devarim (Deuteronomy). How did com­men­tators and trans­lators inter­acted with the Torah / Pen­ta­teuch? We will identify some of the major com­men­taries, both mar­ginal and inde­pendent, both in writing and visual. For our con­ceptual map, however, we will focus on a text that is not the law –but next to it. The Song of Songs and some of its com­men­taries against the back­ground of Erich Auer­bach’s Figura.

For this session we will work directly with the dig­i­tized version of the Smith­field Dec­retals, a copy of Gregory IX’s col­lection of eccle­si­as­tical or canon law that poses several dif­ferent micro­lit­erary issues, including how to address the rela­tionship between text and images.

We will be reading Robyn Stacey’s book Law and the Imag­i­nation in Medieval Wales (2018). We will focus on the main thesis of the book that inter­con­nects law pro­duction and political fiction, and we will address the question from the per­spective of the knowledge we have acquired and created through the semester.

For this session, we will be working alongside Prof. Julian Weiss, from King’s College, London. He will be pre­senting his current research on trans­la­tions and early printings of Flavius Josephus’ Antiq­uities and Jewish War. He will discuss his findings in relation with the history of Jewish people in late medieval and early modern Iberian Worlds (1492–1687).