Roman jurists produced an abundant body of literature, used both in practice and in teaching, which was the main gateway to knowledge of the law in force in the Roman world. However, this literary production came to a halt during the 3rd century A.D. It is often concluded that the law developed by the " classical " jurists ceased to be used and even understood in Late Antiquity, with the cause and effect of a drop in the level of legal culture.
Having been led to doubt this interpretation by preliminary studies, I undertook systematic research in collaboration with a team of legal historians, philologists, historians and papyrologists, to show the persistence of jurist thought between the 4th and 6th centuries. While no new original works were written by jurists active in Late Antiquity, the works of their classical predecessors continued to circulate and ensure the spread of their thought, in schools and in practice.
In fact, their traces survive in a large number of papyri and parchments dating back to the 4th,5th and 6th centuries, which attest to the circulation and - through annotations - the intense use, also in this late period, of works written in earlier centuries. A literary canon is thus taking shape, ensuring the continuity of learned Roman law in Late Antiquity.
Thanks to research carried out in major European and American collections as part of the ERC Redhis-Rediscovering the Hidden Structure project, a significant number of fragments of jurists' writings have been found and identified, increasing the hitherto known volume by around 50 %. The result is therefore to show that, even during the centuries when imperial legislation asserted itself with intensity, Roman law retained a " hidden structure " (which is the title of this research) constituted by the writings of classical jurists.
