CMRS Faculty Roundtable
“The Old French Translation of Gratian’s Decretum: A New Proof of the Translator’s Identity”
Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Albeit preserved in a Central French copy, the OFr translation of Gratian’s Decretumcan be attributed to an Anglo-Norman because of its dialectal words and technical terms, and also because of its nominal as well as verbal morphology. It represents an early form of Decretum and it seems to have already influenced literature in the late twelfth century. The language and age of the translation allow a tentative attribution to Thomas Becket. This attribution is encouraged by the closeness of the translation to the Getty Latin MS Ludwig XIV:2, the latter thought to have been prepared for Thomas Becket’s exile court. But as Dr. Leena Löfstedt (CMRS Associate, and University of Helsinki) demonstrated in this talk, an even better proof of the identity of the translator can be found in the translation itself, where a tiny omission creates a legal text fit to support a thought of Becket’s.