Da Giovanni il Sanguinario a Costanziano. Rileggendo il «Papiro Butini» (P.Ital. 55)

This article discusses a document widely known as “Butini papyrus”. Published and analyzed by important scholars of late antique and medieval written culture, the Butini papyrus is usually considered as the “Roman” model of most early medieval chancery documents. A revision, as well as a new contextualization, lead to propose a different interpretation: written in Ravenna during the years AD 540-543, the papyrus is already part of the post-Roman world; moreover, it is the closest original document we have to the epistles of the Ostrogothic kings, collected in the Variae of Cassiodorus