Rivista Internazionale di Diritto Comune 21 (2010) ???-??? KENNETH PENNINGTON The Constitutiones of King Roger II of Sicily in Vat. lat. 8782 In an essay that was published in 2006 I argued that a manuscript in the Vatican Library (Vat. lat. 8782) contained a collection of Roger II’s constitutions that jurists who were working for the king at his court in Palermo put together at Roger’s royal command ca. 1140 1 . In the last volume of this journal Ennio Cortese has thrown doubt on my conclusions 2 . I will deal with some of Professor Cortese’s arguments later on in this essay, but first I will discuss the evidence for dating the manuscript because its date is crucial for his doubts and for my conclusions. If, as I have argued, it dates to the mid-twelfth century, Professor Cortese’s arguments and those of his scholarly predecessors cannot be sustained. In first part of this essay I will argue that the evidence contained in the margins of Vat. Lat. 8782 supports a date for the manuscript of ca. 1150 – at the latest. Professor Cortese’s dating of the manuscript to the end of the twelfth century is supported by a long scholarly tradition. Many previous and recent scholars have concluded that Vat. lat. 8782 is a late twelfth- or even early thirteenth-century manuscript 3 . Because of the manuscript’s late date, ca. 50 years after Roger II promulgated his Constitutiones, Professor Cortese argues that the compilation of laws was not a product of Roger’s court. The individual Constitutiones were, however, authentic. He thinks that there may have been a constitution or two of Roger’s successors mixed into the collection. Consequently, Professor Cortese does not believe that the collection of Roger’s legislation was, as I have 1 ‘The Birth of the Ius commune: King Roger II’s Legislation’, Rivista internazionale del diritto comune 17 (2006) 23-60. 2 Ennio Cortese, ‘Il diritto romano in Sicilia prima e dopo l’istituzione del Regno’, Rivista Internazionale di diritto comune 19 (2009) 1-13. 3 Most recently Francesca Macino, Sulle tracce delle istituzioni di Giustiniano nell’alto medioevo: I manoscritti dal VI al XII secolo (Studi e testi 446. Città del Vaticano 2008) 156-160, who dates the manuscript to the second half of the twelfth century and argues for a Northern Italian scriptorium; I would accept her conclusion about the origins of the manuscript for the first part containing the Lombarda but not for the second half of the manuscript. 1 Rivista Internazionale di diritto comune 21 (2010) 35-54