El testamento y su publicación sacramental en la Cataluña altomedieval: una oportunidad para la lexicografía

Abstract

[eng] This article focuses on the opportunities afforded the lexicographer by a particular case of double tradition of early medieval documents: wills and their sacramental publications. The existence of this double tradition for the same legal act, fostered by the stipulations of the Visigothic law in force in the Catalan counties, is fortunate for early medieval Latin lexicography in Catalonia, as it generates evidence not available in other regions and provides lexicographers with a wealth of research opportunities. In this paper, three wills and their respective sacramental publications are compared. The latter have in common the fact that they were drawn up by the learned judge Ermengol, who practised in the diocese of Urgell in the second half of the eleventh century. In the publications, Ermengol substitutes some terms in the original will without any apparent legal reason. These lexical pairs, which function as glosses, supply the lexicographer with valuable material that enables them to identify variants, connect a Romance term with a Latin one, and confirm or establish the meaning of various words. These cases of double tradition constitute a rich resource for medieval Latin lexicography, since they offer solutions that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.