Since the time of Mortreuil and Zachariä von Lingenthal in the nineteenth century, the study of Byzantine law has largely been dominated by continental scholars working in French, German, and Greek. It has also traditionally been heavily focused on Quellenkritik. This combination has left the subject rather inaccessible to an Anglophone and non-Byzantinist audience. However, following the 2015 publication of works by David Wagschal and Michael Humphreys on aspects of early Byzantine law, Zachary Chitwood's Byzantine Legal Culture and the Roman Legal Tradition opens up the history (and historiography) of the Middle Byzantine legal system to a much wider readership.Footnote ¹ It is an extremely welcome contribution.

The book is based on Chitwood's 2012 Ph.D. dissertation, although it has been reworked in several areas and expanded with an entirely new chapter (“Law and Heresy in the Edicts of the Patriarch Alexios Stoudites”) based on a separate article.Footnote ² Chitwood attempts to shift the scholarly discussion from a narrow concentration on source criticism to the question of what the sources reveal about Byzantine ‘legal culture’, a term borrowed from legal anthropology that Chitwood defines as “any aspect of the interaction between the official legal regime and various phenomena. . . of Middle Byzantine society.” (p. 7) This sounds like a lot to cover, but in practice the notorious paucity of source material from this period helps to delimit his subject.

Chitwood has many valuable insights, particularly on the codification efforts of Basil I (r. 867–886) and Leo VI (r. 886–912) and on the creation of the ‘law school’ of Constantinople by Constantine IX Monomachos in the 1040s. His analytical framework is strong and persuasive, examining Byzantine law in terms of its evolving relationship with Roman political identity, Orthodox Christian belief, and Hellenic culture. Although these are not exactly radical lenses through which to look at Byzantine culture, they serve Chitwood's purpose well and it is hard to fault his conclusion that they shaped a peculiarly Middle Byzantine legal mindset. The only area of his argument with which I would quibble is his repeated assertion that the eleventh century witnessed the “end of secular law.” Though it is true that ecclesiastical lawyers came to dominate Byzantine legal scholarship from the twelfth century onwards, it is not accurate to speak of the “subsuming” of secular law into canon law (p. 96). At the very least, this claim needs to be significantly nuanced.

Unfortunately there is a tension between the need to create a satisfying narrative arc on the one hand and the need to address important themes and questions in Byzantine legal scholarship on the other. This gives the book a rather disjointed structure. While the first chapter deals with a relatively defined political project in the ninth/tenth centuries, the following two chapters shift to thematic discussions of patronage (which we would today label corruption) and of jurisprudence respectively. Chapter four is an exercise in Quellenkritik, providing an (admittedly very good) examination of the popularity of the ‘private’ collections known as the leges speciales in Byzantium and neighbouring states. Chapter five, on Alexios Stoudites’ edicts relating to Syrian Christians in Melitene, is in itself an excellent essay on the role of eleventh-century jurists in shaping the church's legal interpretation of heresy. However, it is an oddly specific historical moment to discuss and feels jarringly out-of-place; it is probably not a coincidence that this chapter was not in the original dissertation. Chapter six essentially returns to a thematic focus, looking at legal education over the period. Consequently, one does not quite receive either a coherent narrative arc or a comprehensive thematic discussion.

In spite of these broader structural issues, Chitwood is an enjoyable writer who presents his subject in an engaging and personable way, avoiding the dryness that can easily characterise the study of Byzantine law. There are some minor typographical errors and an occasional tendency towards repetition; for example, the process of exhellenismos is defined on p. 160 despite already having been defined on p. 151 and described over the course of pp. 156–60. His command of relevant scholarship is likewise admirable, though it came as a surprise that there is no mention in the book of Lisa Bénou's 2011 monograph on Byzantine juridical theory and practice in the fourteenth century.Footnote ³ Though her focus is on a later period, Bénou has many important observations on ‘law in the books’ and ‘law in action’ in Byzantium that have a direct bearing on Chitwood's subject, and so it is a disappointment that she has been overlooked here.

Byzantine Legal Culture and the Roman Legal Tradition will not be the last word on the subject, but one might call it the first (at least in English), a significant fact in its own right. Whatever criticisms have been raised in this review, it is an extremely valuable work of scholarship that will be of interest not only to Byzantinists but also to those with an interest in the fate of Roman law in the Middle Ages. Moreover, with this book Chitwood has proved that Byzantine law consists of more than Quellenkritik; it has much to offer the study of legal history more generally.