Michael Eber – Stefan Esders – David Ganz – Till Stüber Selection and Presentation of Texts in Early Medieval Canon Law Collections: Approaching the Codex Remensis (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Phill. 1743)* For anyone interested in the period of late antiquity it seems all too familiar that law, legal texts and legal knowledge are subject to highly complex processes of selecting materials, extracting individual passages, interpreting them and adding commenta- ries. Both the Theodosian Code and the Justinianic codification projects provide ample evidence of how collecting individual decrees, jurists’ commentaries and gen- eral regulations and assembling them within one codex allowed for the systematiza- tion of the material contained therein. At the same time, a codification of law would lead to a suppression of alternative norms.¹ Much of this work was carried out by ju- rists commissioned by the state or indeed the ruler. This still holds true for the first official redaction of the Theodosian Code with its novels and additions, the so-called Breviarium Alaricianum or Lex Romana Visigothorum, compiled under the Visigothic King Alaric II in Southwestern Gaul shortly after 500.² However,when tracing the nu- merous compilations and epitomes that were produced on the basis of the Theodo- sian Code and Alaric’s breviary in the post-Roman West between the 6 th and 8 th cen- turies (such as the Epitome Aegidii, the Epitome Parisina or the Epitome * The paper originally delivered by Stefan Esders at the Zurich conference, being more introductory in character, underwent significant changes and considerable extension, as the project applied for funding together with Eef Overgaauw (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) was fortunately granted by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2017. For this reason,what had been a mere outline of further research presented at the Zurich conference in 2016, became substantially augmented in the course of the project by Michael Eber and Till Stüber, both research associates within the project, and by David Ganz, who as a Mercator fellow joined the group in 2018. Although this article is a result of a joint collaboration and of intense communication within the project, the reader will hardly escape to no- tice that individual parts were for a large part written by individual authors, such as chapter 1 by David Ganz, chapter 4 by Till Stüber and chapter 6 by Michael Eber. However, the result is much more than the sum of its individual parts. – We would very much like to thank Albert Fenton for cor- recting and improving the language of this article.  On the methods and aims of late antique legal compilations, see especially John F. Matthews, Lay- ing Down the Law: A Study of the Theodosian Code, New Haven 2001 and some of the essays collect- ed in Jill Harries and Ian. N.Wood (eds.), The Theodosian Code. Studies in the Imperial Law of Late Antiquity, London 1993.  Detlef Liebs, Geltung kraft Konsenses oder kraft königlichem Befehl? Die lex Romana unter den Westgoten, Burgundern und Franken, in: Recht und Konsens im frühen Mittelalter, ed. by Verena Epp and Christoph Meyer, Ostfildern 2017, 63 – 85. OpenAccess. © 2021 Michael Eber – Stefan Esders – David Ganz – Till Stüber, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110757279-008