A Code of Laws, Which Did Not Exist: How Began to Teach the Siete Partidas in the Universities

Abstract

The author analyzes the history of the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X the Wise to establish when they began to be taught at universities and why the Partidas became the subject of lawyers’study in so late. He emphasizes that the Partidas were perceived by Castilian lawyers and notaries precisely as local law, as opposed to ius commune, represented by the texts of the Justinian Corpus and the norms of canon law. The author sees the reason for this in the language in which the Partidas was composed — the romance language never became a «language for the high culture», which means that the texts created in it had practically no chance of becoming scholastic authorities. At the end of the article, the author shows that at universities began to study the Partidas only in the midst of 18th century, after the creation of the departments of the so-called «derecho patrio». Up to this point, the legal community had kept the texts of royal law out of the university classrooms, although the most intelligent and astute of jurists recognized the need to study it.