Reception of Roman law in North-Western Russia in 14th–15th centuries: widow and late husband property

• Published in: Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana
• Main Authors: Vovin, Aleksey Aleksandrovich, Sredinskaya, Nataliya Bronislavovna
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Russian
• Published: St Petersburg State University 2022
• Subjects: Pskov Judicial Charter; Medieval Novgorod; Medieval Pskov; Roman Law Reception; Code of Justinian; Russkaya; North-Western Russia
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu19.2022.106; http://hdl.handle.net/11701/38581

The article is about the influence of the Roman law on the Russian private act and statutes. The focus is on one legal collision regarding a widow life-long use of her late husband’s property (since she does not remarry). That case was equally reflected in the documents of the North-West of Russia asa well as in those ones of the North-Italian commune cities. In search of the sources of this legal norm, the articles of the Pskov Judicial Charter (PJC), the Code of Justinian (CJ), the Byzantine Ecloga (E) and the Extensive Edition of Russkaya Pravda (RP) are compared. It turns out that the texts of PJC and CJ are extremely close to each other both in semantic and textual terms, and at the same time they differ significantly from the texts of E and RP, which, in turn, are close. Thus, it turns out that the legal norm of the North-West of Russia, reflected both in the private acts and in the PJC, goes back to the CJ directly, bypassing the Byzantine legal tradition. To a certain extent, this reverses the traditional historiographic ideas that the influence of Roman law on Old Russian law was insignificant and, moreover, passed through the Byzantine «filter». The research was carried out with the financial support of a grant from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation in the form of subsidies as part of Project No. 075-15-2020-786 «History of Writing in European Civilization».