Editing the Instituta Cnuti
I have been working for some years on a new edition of a postconquest Latin lawcode known variously as the Instituta Cnuti or Instituta de legibus regum Anglorum. The process has led to discoveries about the manuscripts and the text itself, some of which has appeared in print–most recently in my introduction to Textus Roffensis: Law, Libraries, and Language in Early Medieval England (2015) and in “Pre-conquest Laws and Legislators in the Twelfth Century” (2015). In 2011, I began to write a series of blog posts for the Early English Laws website which described this process. The work is still ongoing; I expect to add more posts over the next three years and complete the series. The links below should take you to the individual posts at the Early English Laws site.
- Editing the Instituta Cnuti
- Editing the Instituta Cnuti 2: Finding the Witnesses
- Editing the Instituta Cnuti 3: Transcriptions
- Editing the Instituta Cnuti 4: Original witness or derivative copy? The case of Textus Roffensis and the Rawlinson manuscript.
- Editing the Instituta Cnuti 5: Peculiar witness or new code?