How did the authors of the Breviarium Alaricanum work? The example of the laws on Jews
Capucine Nemo-Pekelman, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
In: Historical Research, Volume 86, Issue 233, pages 394–407, August 2013
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2281.12019

ABSTRACT:
To understand the authors of the Breviarium Alaricanum and their purpose, logic and their methods it is necessary to undertake an internal study of the work – a law code collected in sixth-century Aquitaine. This article analyses Alaric’s Breviary, focusing specifically on those laws that concern the Jews. In the authors’ selection of the sources of Roman law, and the organization of those laws in the Breviary, the ‘prudentes’ who produced it made significant choices. This is even more apparent in the rewriting and commentaries. These laws reflect the issues which existed in Western Jewish communities at that time – issues which, as the compilers knew, were still dealt with in tribunals. In their selection and rewriting the prudentes took rather radical steps of removing passages which were not strictly legislative, deleted the majority of contradictory measures and clarified the style”. According to Nemo-Pekelman this was in contradiction to the codifiers of the Theodosian Code, who “had created a consistent work of propaganda on the model of apologetic and heresiological literature to create new legal categories of citizens defined by their religious adherence. They had produced a legal category for heretics, one for pagans and one for the Jews” … “this accumulation of laws and their classification was meant to underline that these citizens ere a marginal group within the civic body” (p.300) According to Capucine Nemo-Pekelman, the authors of the breviary of Alaric did not extend this work of propaganda.

The article is part of a collection of papers presented at a conference in Copenhagen in 2011 organised in a collaboration between three digitisation projects: “Early English Law“, “Nordic Medieval Laws” and “Relmin”. The work on the Breviary of Alaric was carried through in the framework of Relmin.