From the fifth to the tenth centuries a legal culture emerged in the Latin West that might best be characterized as legal or normative pluralism. A particularly fascinating window into this complex history of the formation of a European legal landscape is the quite manifold and rich corpus of legal compendia that have come down to us from the Carolingian period. It represents the coexistence, interaction, and interdependence of a variety of legal orders and traditions. Just as importantly, these many laws began to be compiled and codified, so that a single manuscript might gather together regional adaptations of imperial Roman law, provincial Roman law, local customary laws, the laws of communities that came to live in the Roman empire (the so-called “barbarian” laws), and last but not least Christian and ecclesiastical laws. In my presentation I would like to discuss some compendia from the Carolingian period and compare their specific selection and arrangement with the spectrum of possibilities available to editors and compilers at the time. The comparison shall help to illustrate that these compendia did not just have a representative function but demonstrate the urgent and intelligent work on legal frameworks and institutions and how this work reflects changing patterns and structures of legal pluralism from the time of Charlemagne to the later and post-Carolingian world.
Helmut Reimitz is the Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 Professor of European History at the History Department of Princeton University where he teaches late antique and early medieval History. From July 2026, he will commence his positions of Director of the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and of Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Vienna. His research has been focused on the formation of some distinctive features of the Christian West in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, such as the establishment of the post-Roman worldview of Europe as a world of peoples, the transformation of the Roman legal landscape to the legally pluralistic constellations of medieval Europe, and changing patterns of communication and exchange in late antique and early medieval manuscript cultures. More recently he has started to explore the rich and manifold evidence of manuscript transmission shedding light on how late antique and early medieval societies managed, organized and reorganized diversity in various social, political, intellectual contexts and discourses. His numerous publications include the monograph History, Frankish Identity and the Rise of Western Ethnicity, 550-850 (Cambridge University Press, 2017).