page_title: Sardinian literature
section_title: The Middle Ages
hierarchical_section_title: Sardinian literature / The Middle Ages
caption_attribution_description: English: Carta de logu de Arbarei
context_page_description: The literature of Sardinia is the literary production of Sardinian authors, as well as the literary production generally referring to Sardinia as argument, written in various languages.
context_section_description: Literary production was few throughout the Middle Ages: some hagiographic texts, in Latin, in prose and poetry, often extensively reworked in later centuries, have come down to us. Some of them have very ancient origins, perhaps dating back to the monastery and religious literature that was created in Cagliari around the figure of St. Fulgence of Ruspe at the time of his exile during the reign vandal Thrasamund. In this period were written in Cagliari some of the most precious and ancient codes of the time, like maybe the Codex Lausianus, containing one or perhaps the oldest one edition of the Acts of the Apostles, has come down and now preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the Codex Basilianus, containing some of the works of St. Hilary of Poitiers, wrote in Cagliari, as a specified in a note in the manuscript and preserved in the Vatican Library. The Passions of the martyrs San Saturno, San Lussorio and San Gavino also come down as well as the hagiographic stories of Sant'Antioco and San Giorgio from Suelli.
  Characteristic of medieval Sardinia, in the eleventh century, was the early use of the vernacular in the acts of the Sardinian kings, records of monasteries or notary and in the legislation. For the history of the island, particular importance had the promulgation of the Carta de Logu of Arborea, a legal code which condensed the old common law especially for the countryside, to integrate of Roman laws (Codex Justinianus) in force across Europe. The early use of vulgar Sardinian date back to the eleventh century: we can find it in the acts of donations of the Judges (kings) to various religious orders and in condaxis or condaghes that were administrative documents.
  Among the most important texts are the statutes of the Commune of Sassari, written in Latin and logudorese Sardinian in 1316. The document is divided into three parts: the first concerns the public law, civil law, the second and the third criminal law. This code was gradually adopted by many municipalities on the island. Other municipalities had their own statutes, as Cagliari and Iglesias, whose short of Villa di Chiesa was prepared in Tuscany.
  Also in the fourteenth century was promulgated by Mariano IV the Carta de Logu, which was the code of the laws of the State of the court of Arborea. The paper was subsequently updated and expanded by Eleanor, daughter of Mariano. This code of laws continues to be considered one of the most innovative and interesting of the XIII century.
  There is no literature in Sardinia for most of the Middle Ages. In Judicial era there are several documents in Sardinian typically consisting of records and legal documents, that consists of condaghi and different cartas de logu. A small medieval text in the history of the Sardinian judge of Torres, the Libellus Judicum Turritanorum constitutes the first historiographic text. The first literary work in Sardinian, now at the end of the Middle Ages, from the second half of the fifteenth century, however, published about a century later. It is a poem inspired by the life of the holy martyrs turritani by the Archbishop of Sassari Antonio Canu. This work is the only one before the second half of the sixteenth century.
  [edit]
caption: Carta de logu de Arbarei
exif: {}