The third meeting of the Ancient Law reading group will take place on Wednesday 12th November at 5pm in Samuel Alexander S2.2. Melissa Markauskas will be leading a discussion on 'The Theodosian Code… as a Letter Collection?' Melissa has kindly provided the following introductory comments:
"The Theodosian Code preserves Roman legal material from the early fourth century AD through to the first third of the fifth. As counter-intuitive as it might at first seem, the individual constitutions of the Theodosian Code meet typical genre category guidelines for "letters." Even as they are preserved within the impressively hefty sixteen books of the Code, the original nature of these constitutions as letters, as messages taken down in tangible media and physically transmitted between parties who are separated by physical distance, is obvious in the address and subscription formula that appear with almost all constitutions.
This informal seminar will consider this "letter" metadata from a selection of Theodosian Code constitutions and ask what difference it makes to format a law code (or, indeed, legal texts in general) in this way."
No prior preparation is expected or required, but the reading is available here. Copies will be provided on the day.
