| LOCATION | London, BL |
| MANUSCRIPT | London, BL, Additional 8873 |
| ITEM No. 1 | Canonum collectio ("Britannica") |
Canonum collectio ("Britannica")
Canonum collectio ("Britannica") . This is a copy from a broad collection of materials for further uses, collected in mid Italy (in the pope's Lateran Archives?) by some supporter of the Gregorian church reform who searched for normative texts from Antiquity which had so far found little or no attention. This person was only interested in the text's antique authenticity, rather than in the text's contents. The aim was to let adversaries understand that one had a ‘secret weapon’ at hand, namely unknown texts of doubtless authenticity, and one would keep one's adversaries in the dark about what could possibly be based on these texts.
The original collector had copied the text passages from their sources in the order which they had in the respective source - and this is how the scribe of MS London, BL, Additional 8873 took them over. He however committed some inadvertencies here and there, and at times he clipped some words. The most recent source text originates from 1089.
Large parts of the same original collection were also copied into MS Paris, BArsenal, 713, fol. 117-192. There, in contrast, the snippets of text are re-arranged, and in the same order as in early versions of the {i}Decretum{/i} by Ivo Carnotensis episcopus.
Texts of the original collection mentioned above were also used for the {i}Tripartita A{/i}, and for the {i}Panormia{/i}, and for {i}Canonum collectio ("Caesaraugustana"){/i}.
Composition: fol. 1r-8v index to first part; fol. 9r-126v First part, graphically complete; fol. 127r-210v Second part, rubrics not executed, and lacking an index.
Contents: mainly decretal letters of popes, drawn from the registers of the respective pope. Gelasius I (492-496); Pelagius I (555-560); Alexander II (1061-1073); thereafter 'Varia', pars 1 (fol. 52r-120r); then again popes: Johannes VIII (872-882); corrispondentia sancti Bonifatii; Urbanus II (1088-1099); Stephanus VI (885-891); Leo IV (847-855); finally again 'Varia', pars 2 (fol. 171r-210v).
Excerpts from Roman law are found in 'Varia' pars 2 (12 fragments from Digesta, D.1-2.1.15, fol. 181v-182r) - and in 'Varia' pars 1 (81 fragments from D.2.4.2 onward, fol. 52r-56v, and texts from Institutiones, fol. 56v-65v). Almost all Digest texts derive from Digestum vetus, except one fragment of D.30.39.6 and another fragment from D.41.3.15.1. Derivation of excerpts of Justinian's Digesta: Antonia Fiori found that the original collector neither copied from the Littera Florentina nor from some MS closely related to Paris 4450 or Vatican vat.lat. 1406 or Leipzig 873 or Padova, BU, 941.
No. of pages: (item 1)