The Ames Foundation

Legal History at Glasgow

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Volume 8 [2012]

Clyde Pharr, the Women of Vanderbilt, and the Wyoming Judge: The Story behind the Translation of the Theodosian Code in Mid-Century America

Linda Jones Hall

When Clyde Pharr published his massive English translation of the Theodosian Code with Princeton University Press in 1952, two former graduate students at Vanderbilt University were acknowledged as co-editors: Theresa Sherrer Davidson as Associate Editor and Mary Brown Pharr, Clyde Pharr’s wife, as Assistant Editor. Many other students were involved. This article lays out the role of those students, predominantly women, whose homework assignments, theses, and dissertations provided working drafts for the final volume. Pharr relied heavily on their work, as well as on the work of Justice Fred Blume of Wyoming, who supplied to Pharr his unpublished translation of Justinian's Code and drafts of parts of the Theodosian Code. Pharr’s debt to Theresa Davidson was substantial and unevenly acknowledged, and this led to a dispute and a great deal of acrimony, until Davidson ultimately won the right to have her scholarship acknowledged in the publication of the Code. The evidence for this article comes from previously unpublished materials, including those held by the Davidson family and relatives of other students; Princeton University Press; Special Collections and University Archives at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University; and the University of Wyoming College of Law.

[Pp. 1–42

Leviticus, the Emperor Theodosius, and the Law of God: Three Prohibitions of Male Homosexuality

Timothy D. Barnes

The present article argues, following Edoardo Volter­ra, that the so-called Mosaicarum et Romanarum legum collatio is a Jewish compilation, not a Christian one. The argu­ment has three stages. (1) The transmitted title of Lex Dei quam praecepit dominus ad Moysen, which is authentic, was supplanted in the late sixteenth century by the false title that became con­ventional. (2) As extant, the work represents a revision made in Rome in or shortly after 390 of a work originally composed early in the fourth century. (3) The reviser of the work in 390 or later has subtly modified the Latin translation of Leviticus 20.13 in the title De stupratoribus (Lex Dei 5.3) to bring it more into line with Theodosius’ law of 390 shutting down male brothels in Rome (Co­dex Theodosianus 9.7.6).

[Pp. 43–62

Fragmenta Londiniensia Anteiustiniana: Preliminary Observations

Simon Corcoran and Benet Salway

This article gives a preliminary account of seventeen small parchment fragments, which have been the subject of detailed study by members of the team of the Projet Volterra since the end of 2009. The fragments have been identified as coming from a legal text in Latin, indeed possibly all from the same page, written in a fifth-century uncial book-hand, but with some numeration and glosses in Greek. The fragments contain part of a rubricated title, as well as the headings and subscripts to several imperial rescripts of third-century emperors (Caracalla, Gordian III and the Philips are explicitly named), organized in a broadly chronological sequence without intervening commentary. Three rescripts overlap with texts known from the Justinian Code (C.7.62.3, 4, and 7). It is argued here that the work in the fragments is from neither the first nor second editions of the Justinian Code, nor from a juristic miscellany (similar to the Fragmenta Vaticana, Lex Dei, or Consultatio). Despite the appar­ently anomalous presence of a tetrarchic rescript (otherwise typi­cally attributed to the Hermogenian Code), the conclusion is that these fragments most plausibly represent the only known remains of a manuscript of the lost Gregorian Code. An appendix gives some sample texts, including all the material overlapping with the Justinian Code.

[Pp. 63–83




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