This collection of articles is the second volume in the Religion and Law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies series, edited by John Tolan. The first volume, The legal status of Dimmī-s in the Islamic West, appeared in 2013. The third volume will concern ‘Religious cohabitation in European towns (10th–15th centuries)’. The series is an outcome of the European Research Council project RELMIN: The Legal Status of Religious Minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean World (fifth–fifteenth centuries).

The law codes of imperial Rome and the early Middle Ages, together with the rich canonical material produced by numerous synods and church councils and brought together in a range of canonical collections, constitute the base from which the momentous legal developments of the twelfth century took off. Studied in its own right, the early legal material is much more than a record of dry regulations. Read within the full context of the political, socio-economic and religious developments of the period, the material has a great deal to say about the societies that it attempted to regulate. In particular, the material has a considerable amount to say concerning the lives of Jews in different areas of Christendom and about developing Christian ideas on the position of Jews in Christian society.

And this is what the articles in this volume set out to do. Articles are in English and French. Ralph Mathisen provides very useful background in his contribution on ‘The citizenship of Jews in Roman law during late antiquity (ca. 300–540 ce)’. His exposition that multiple citizenships could co-exist in one person is particularly helpful, as is his exposition of how Christian Roman law gradually chipped away at the rights that Jews had as Roman citizens, even as it continued to recognise and uphold Judaism as a legitimate religion. Bruno Judic expounds the well-known legislation concerning Jews of Gregory the Great; David Freidenreich provides interesting comparisons between the way in which early canon law dealt with Jews and the manner in which it treated pagans and heretics. Five contributions focus on the rich legal material from Visigothic Iberia which includes the Law of the Visigoths and numerous canons from a long series of Toledan Councils; three concern Byzantium, of which one is written by Alexander Panayotov, a collaborator on the ‘Mapping the Jewish communities in the Byzantine Empire project’ headed by Nicholas De Lange. Four articles examine material from the Carolingian empire and its successors. By far the longest article at forty-eight pages is by Amnon Linder, the editor of the indispensable reference works for this area of research: The Jews in Roman imperial legislation (1987) and The Jews in the legal sources of the early Middle Ages (1997). Here he discusses the Jewry-Oath which was specially designed for Jews when proceedings with Christians required sworn assurances. As it evolved and was applied in different ways from the seventh to the early part of the twentieth centuries its format became increasingly humiliating for the Jewish oath-taker. The topic is of tremendous interest, but it does not fit well with the timescale of the rest of the volume.

It is not clear to me whether the articles in the volume were commissioned by the editors or whether they stem from papers given at seminars or conferences organised through the RELMIN programme. Whatever the case may be, the editors could have done more to create greater consistency between articles on similar topics. María Jesús Fuente's assertions that Jewish women in Visigothic Iberia compensated in their homes for the closure of synagogues and Talmudic schools [sic] (pp. 280–1) sit very uneasily with Raúl González Salinero's alignment with the camp which argues that the Jews of Visigothic Iberia effectively had no Hebrew. Salinero concludes that when Julian of Toledo (†690) referred to codices Hebraeorum or codices Hebraici he probably meant Jewish works written in Latin (pp. 198–203). For her part, Bat-Sheva Albert interprets the Placitum of 637 which identifies some Jewish texts as Deuteras as demonstrating that Jews in Visigothic Iberia were acquainted with the Mishna (p. 190). I do not think that the brief allusion to Salinero's position in the conclusion deals with this issue adequately.

Highlights of the volume include the way in which Céline Martins uncovers the shades of personal freedom and the lack thereof in Visigothic Iberia. Some freemen were freer than others; conversely a Visigothic servus had more legal options than a Roman one would have had. In post-Roman Hispania reducing a free person to servile status was a punishment used to commute the death penalty required by Roman law for crimes against the state. Seen in this context, what is so very startling in the Visigothic ‘enslavement’ of Jews in 694 was that all Jews were reduced to servile status without a trial. Rachel Stocking sheds welcome light on canon 10 of the Council of Seville (c. 624) which more and more scholars are beginning to recognise as authentic. The canon deals with attempts made by forcibly-converted Jews to avoid baptising their children. What is so remarkable is that the bishops seemed to endorse Sisibut's forced conversion of the Jews. At the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633 the bishops upheld the forced conversions which had occurred, even as they declared that no one should be forced to convert. For his part Philippe Depreux argues convincingly that the much maligned Capitula de Iudeis may have originated in the court of Charlemagne or Louis the Pious after all. Johannes Heil makes a very good case for reading the canons concerning Jews in Burchard's Decretum (c. 1012) in the light of the bishop of Worms's eschatological expectations. And Paul Magdalino makes clear how important it is to take account of the eschatological expectations of Byzantine emperors such as Heraclius (d. 641) as well as contemporary Jewish messianic hopes to make sense of imperial interaction with the Jewish community.