I work on the manuscripts of the Lex Salica. The law code should have been written in the VIth century, but the oldest manuscript we kept is from the end of the VIIIth century. The firts step is to understand what has been done from the 90 manuscripts to the so-called scientific edition by K. A. Eckhardt in the Monumenta in 1962, and how the variability of the different versions had been obscured to create only six united text. Then, I would like to understand this mutabiity. Why did scribes write down the Lex Salica centuries after its publication? Why and how did they change the text they received? And then I would present a general reflexion of the authority of law, king and aristocrats in the Early Middle Ages. Who fixed the law and its application?

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