Ricerche sulle tecniche di scrittura delle Istituzioni di Gaio

[Machine translation] The Institutions of Gaius have always occupied a very special position in the panorama of Romanesque law studies, and, more generally, of Western legal culture. The subject of an endless series of analyses, the manual written shortly after the second half of the second century A.D. by a jurist known to us only through the cognomen has been referred to from time to time as a paradigm of classicism or as the mediocre product of a provincial teacher, on whose identity, however, every kind of conjecture has been formulated. Very recent methodological guidelines call for a return to the text understood as the place of the “mysterious appointment” with its author, according to the metaphor, openly allusive to Benjaminian suggestions, formulated by a contemporary scholar. In this perspective, this book retraces the main questions traditionally posed in literature about the genesis, form and method of creation of institutions, also in relation to the target environment, and, following the analysis of well-known sections of the Gaiano manual, a reading of the text and its formation is offered that takes into account the reassessment, which has been going on for more than half a century, of the didactic-didactic literature of antiquity, without however neglecting intuitions and older lines of research, of which proposes a recovery, freed from the methodological outrage that has heavily compromised its consideration in recent decades.