The so-called Appendices to the Lex Romana Visigothorum: compilation and transmission of three Late Roman private legal collections

This paper is the first study to map the transmission of the Appendices to the Lex Romana Visigothorum. Based on full collations of all (8+3) known witnesses, it establishes the stemma codicum for the Appendices, which differs markedly from the stemma of the LRV text in the same MSS. Furthermore, the philological analysis shows that Appendix 3 is not so much a legal dossier as it is a medieval attempt to fill a lacuna, whereas the composite nature of Appendix 1 (= 1a+b) still leaves us with three Appendices. Moreover, Krüger and Mommsen were mistaken to claim that Vat. Reg. lat. 1128 and Hincmar relied on the Appendices. Finally, MS Berlin lat. fol. 270 must have been copied from MS Ivrea XXXV (17), which goes against palaeographers’ communis opinio about their relative dating.