Adultery Law and the Transmission of the Liber Iudiciorum in Early Medieval Iberia

This paper reads the text of the Liber Iudiciorum through its dynamic transmission in the early Middle Ages. Owing to the lack of surviving manuscripts and documents from the Visigothic period, the study of Visigothic law is by definition post-Visigothic. The code must therefore be considered not only in its early medieval copies, but also in its practical usage as witnessed by early medieval charters of transaction and dispute. The ‘public’ prosecution of adultery in the kingdom of Asturias-León is a case study in what this approach can reveal: as notaries transcribed select provisions of the code from both manuscripts and other charters, they transformed them by adapting their contents and scope to current priorities, and as they included these variably accurate quotations of and allusions to the code in their own charters, they created new witnesses to its living text yet to be addressed in any critical edition. That charters acted as sources of mediated ‘Visigothic law’ calls for us to rethink the distinction between real and rhetorical legal citation: they can be understood as contemporary case law, testimony to a code in constant iterative evolution as it framed transaction and dispute. The kings of Asturias-León made no new law of their own, reliant on the legitimating inheritance of the Visigoths, until issuing their first legal enactments in the Fuero de León of 1017; this reads less as an edict, however, than a partial revision of the code in response to the progress of case law over the intervening centuries. As such, Visigothic law was not just transmitted, but curated and even created in its passage through the early Middle Ages.