Houghton Library’s manuscript of the Digestum Vetus (Houghton b MS typ 121) has been known for some time because of its illuminations. See the Bibliography on it compiled by the Library. It is most fully described on the website known as Digital Scriptorium: “ff. 293 - 15th-century blind-tooled brown calf, with brass bosses and cover-label under horn; rebacked, in case - Bought by Philip Hofer from E. Rosenthal, 1944; donated in 1980 in memory of John Milton Perkins - Illuminated & Calligraphic Manuscripts, no. 133, plate 18; Bond and Faye, Supplement, 260.” While fourteen of the illuminated pages in it have been available online for some time, the text has not been. The Ames Foundation has had the entire text digitized and has made it available through the Harvard University Library’s page delivery service.

The manuscript contains almost the full text of the Digestum Vetus with the Accursian gloss, written in litera Bononiensis. Like the Law School’s manuscript of the Codex, the art-work, the miniatures, the grotesques, the scrolls, the initials, seem to be more in a French rather than in an Italian style. See the description in the HOLLIS catalogue.

Our interest is in the text and the gloss as an example of the Bolognese ‘Vulgate’ edition of the Digestum Vetus produced at a time relatively close to the completion of the Accursian gloss. To this end, we have compiled the ‘metadata’, given below, which link to the pages in the manuscript where each title of the Digestum Vetus begins. Except for fol. 3r and 293r, the manuscript is not foliated, and we have supplied foliation in square brackets. The citations in the metadata use modern form, and the text of the titles is derived from Mommsen’s edition of the Digest. Comparing this text to the text in the manuscript is planned, as is taking the metadata down to the level of the leges, but these are large undertakings. In the meantime, we hope that we have made the digitized copy more ‘user-friendly’.

We found four places where text is missing. The text skips from the middle of D.10.4.11 to the middle of D.11.1.6, from the middle of D.17.2.81 to the middle of D.18.1.8, from the middle of D.22.5.21 to the middle of D.23.1.5, and from the first line of D.23.4.25 to the middle of D.24.1.3. In all cases the skip occurs at a folio break, and the amount that is missing approximates the amount that would occupy a folio with the text and its gloss. In all cases, too, the missing folio begins a new book, where a miniature would have been, and in a couple of cases the stub of the missing folio seems to be visible on the images. While proof positive will not be possible until we make a quire map (which we have not yet done), there seems little doubt that someone vandalized the manuscript in order to take out four miniatures.

In the process of compiling these metadata we discovered an item that does not seem to have been noticed before. After the explicit of the Digestum Vetus and before the final blank end paper, there is a single folio that contains an extensive commentary on, it would seem, D.46.3.100. It is written in a more informal script than the rest of the text, but seems to be roughly contemporary. It runs from [fol. 294ra] to [fol. 294va], three columns, tightly packed and not easily read. ([Fol. 294vb] contains a number of legal notes in a series of even more informal hands with sketches of faces in profile.) Our identification of the three-column item as a Repetitio on D.46.3.100 by an unknown author is highly speculative. The transcription of the heading seems right, but the identification of the citation to D.46.3.100 sits uneasily with what follows because the word creditorem does not appear in either the text or the gloss (though creditor and creditoris do). The incipit, which is also quite clear, itself sits uneasily with D.46.3.100, which does not deal with mutui datio. The explicit is faded, and the transcription of it is almost certainly wrong. The best that we can say is that it is legal citation, probably to the Digest. We offer this description in the hope that it will stimulate someone to do a better job:

Houghton b MS typ 121, fol. [294ra – 294va]. ?Repetitio on D.46.3.100. Heading: Infra de solu[tionibus] l. paulus R’ creditorem. Incipit: Primum quod mutuo datum est. Explicit: ?de novientis l. si certis.

Dennis Mahoney of the Harvard Law School J.D. class of 2016 helped in preparing this metadata. The transition from the printed text of the Corpus of 1604 to the script of the litera Bononiensis was a bit of a jolt, but he soldiered on and ended up by doing a splendid job.