The Digest

---

The part of Justinian's project the essay calls the truly mad one. The commission read close to two thousand books and reduced them by a factor of twenty, in three years against a ten-year deadline.

The method is what the essay draws on: the literature split into three masses, three subcommittees reading in parallel, merged title by title, with known conflicts settled by imperial ruling before the reading began. The essay's phrase for it is that they sharded the corpus.

Its later history carries the other half of the argument. The Digest survived in the West in a single near-complete manuscript until its rediscovery at Bologna at the end of the eleventh century.