ILUSTRACJE MARGINESOWE A PRAKTYKA CZYTELNICZA W KÓRNICKICH DIGESTACH JUSTYNIANA
MARGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS AND READING PRACTICE IN JUSTINIAN’S DIGEST IN THE KÓRNIK LIBRARY

Summary/Abstract: The present essay is a recapitulation and revision of the author’s research conducted on the Digestum vetus kept by the Kórnik Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Ms. 824) over the last fifteen years. It focuses mainly on the 230 illustrations in the manuscript’s margins and explores the ways they interpret the text and facilitate its understanding. The Kórnik Digest was copied in Northern Italy in the late twelfth century or around 1200, but it was illustrated possibly in Paris, in the 2nd quarter of the thirteenth century, with historiated initials and marginal images. At the same time, an early version of Accursius’s Glossa ordinaria was also copied. Sometime in the 1470s, the book was brought to Poland by Dziersław of Karnice, a papal collector and a canon of Płock and Cracow. The marginal images in BK 824 were made by professional illuminators, but they are consistent with the concept and function of the earlier relatively widespread practice of the marking of Roman law manuscripts with text-related drawings. The locations of the images, often shared with other manuscripts of the Digest, and their iconography, give us some insight into the common interests of medieval jurists. On the other hand, the marginal illustrations, which play the role of visual annotations, introduce a subject-based indexation of the text and sometimes also cross-references, allowing us to better understand medieval reading techniques.

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