BENEDETTO LEVITA. — A collection of capitularies of Frankish kings is known under this name, divided into three books designated as V, VI, and VII, because, according to the author’s intention, they were to be considered a supplement to ANSEGISO, SANTO (v.). The collection is preceded by seven couplets, in which the compiler says that his name is B. L., that is, Deacon, and that he completed the work at the behest of Autcario, bishop of Mainz. Pietro Pithoe was the first, in 1588, to question the authenticity of some of the collection’s texts; Baluzius and Savigny still regarded most of them as authentic; but today it is unanimously held that this collection too, like the pseudo-Isidorian one, consists of apocryphal texts. On the basis of a clue contained in book I, chapter 303, it is believed that the work originated in the province of Tours. It dates from between
847 and 852. The three books consist respectively of 405, 436, and 478 chapters. The author’s purpose is to demonstrate that the reforms unsuccessfully demanded by the bishops of the civil authorities of the time were contained in the old capitularies of Pepin, Charlemagne, and Louis the Pious, which had been forgotten but discovered by him.
The sources on which the author chiefly draws are the Libri Sacri, the Quesnelliana, Dionysio-Adriana, and Hispana collections, the Penitenziale di Teodoro, collections of Roman law, the Lex Balucariorum, and the Lex Wisigothorum. The work displays repetitions, contradictions, and disorder, and, in relation to its sources, additions, mutilations, and substitutions. In two manuscripts, four appendices are added. His work, under the title Capitularia spuria, ed. G. H. Pertz, in MGH, Leges, II, II (1837), pp. 17–158.