Lexical changes in Lex Salica Karolina
The paper discusses the vocabulary and text structure changes in the last version of Lex Salica Karolina compiled by the order of Charlemagne in approximately 802 AD. This source is the most well-known and wide-spread legal text of the Early Middle Ages represented in approximately 60 manuscripts of the 9th-10th centuries. It remains, however, poorly examined in historiography. The edition by K.A. Eckhardt in Monumenta Germaniae Historica includes just about a half of all the mentioned manuscripts. However, his study allows us to compare the text structure, the arrangement of chapters, as well as the vocabulary in the recension studied in the present paper against those of the earlier recensions under the titles “A”, “C”, “D”, and “E”. This paper deals with the poorly studied manuscript which is not included in the Eckhardt's edition - the codex Lat. O.v.II № 11 from the National library of Russia in Saint-Petersburg. Compared with the earlier versions, this text (which is also known under the title “K”, and consists of 70 chapters) is remarkable for its good Latin. The most important feature of Lex Salica Karolina is the lack of so called “Malberg glosses” - phrases in Old High German describing different legal cases. Study of the “K” recension shows that it was based mainly on the recensions “A” and “C” (both consisting of 65 chapters), while longer and younger “D” and “E” recensions (consisting of 99 and 100 chapters, respectively) were used as additional sources. Approximately one third of all the chapters was improved by codifiers: they reformulated phrases and titles, trying to express the meaning of the chapters precisely, added legal formulas from texts of the Late Antiquity (“Codex Theodosianus”, the acts of the Synods, and the Church Fathers' works). As for the vocabulary changes, there were only few ones. The codifiers corrected ungrammatical phrases, and other errors of Merovingian Latin without changing the essence of the law. Thus, their corrections and additions regarding the vocabulary and the structure of the text influenced mostly the language of the manuscript, not the contents of the law.