FROM URTEXT TO MANUSCRIPTS: THE CHRONOLOGICAL SCOPE OF FORMULAE

One general observation arising from the examination of individual collections presented in the previous chapter is that most of the datings offered by earlier scholars rely on what ultimately boils down to very flimsy evidence. Due to scribes' efforts to remove details pertaining to the original case described in the document they were turning into a formula, internal evidence rarely gets us very far, and has often been wildly overinterpreted. Links made with datable surviving documents are rarely so clear as to allow us to form definite conclusions, and more often than not involve documents that have since been exposed as forgeries; it is in any case nearly always impossible to know whether the formula would have been based on the document or the document on the formula, and therefore whether a link constitutes a terminus post quem or a terminus ante quem.

Furthermore, information of this kind, when it is available at all, usually only involves one or two formulae out of each collection, and, to make things worse, the evidence provided by these individual texts rarely offers a good match even within a single formulary. The way Zeumer dealt with these internal contradictions, as he saw them, was to break down the collections as they are found in the surviving manuscripts into a number of discrete sections, which he held to be chronologically homogeneous.