Lecture by Michael Crawford (University College London).

The transmission of a knowledge of Roman law in Italy in the Middle Ages has traditionally been studied through the surviving manuscript evidence for the availability and use of the Justinianic corpus, in particular the Digest; but such an approach neither explains how people knew what to do with the Digest when its use began to intensify from the last quarter of the eleventh century onwards nor does justice to the range of available evidence and to the whole intellectual context within which legal knowledge is to be seen. This lecture attempts to tell these different stories.