The subject of this book is the production, circulation, and transmission of southern Italian manuscripts containing nomokanones (canon law collections). It constitutes a revision of the doctoral thesis of the author, who is now Assistant Professor in History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The ambition of the book is to combine codicology, philology, and sociocultural history in order to “historicise” the production of this particular type of religious evidence. Its documentary basis is constituted by thirty-six codices produced between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, which are preserved in various Italian and European libraries. From the point of view of sociocultural history, the question underlying this study is the following: why did Greek Orthodox law continue to be transmitted in southern Italy even after the ecclesiastical jurisdiction over it had formally returned to the Church of Rome at the end of the eleventh century? In order to answer this question, the author resorts to the concept of “legal pluralism,” theorized by R. M. Cover, i.e., the coexistence of “multiple legal systems,” in which law has two ideal-typical modes of functioning: in an imperial sense and in a “paideic” sense. While in the former certain institutions establish and enforce a set of laws valid for all, in the latter a specific community or social group shares a set of norms of behavior. In the case of southern Italy, this model of “paideic” law applies well to interpreting the longevity that the religious law of Byzantine tradition had in Greek-speaking communities.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first, the author explains what a nomokanon is (a collection consisting of conciliar canons, selected texts of patristic authors, and civil laws). Then, in the two chapters that follow, the author offers an overview of Greek Christianity in southern Italy between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, as well as a reconstruction of the main historical processes that were at the basis of the transmission of the Italo-Greek nomocanonical manuscripts that have come down to us. The second part of the book concerns the study of the main areas of production of them, as well as their stylistic, content, and typological characteristics. As one might expect, such places are found in Calabria and Sicily, especially in the monastery of Nea Hodigitria of Rossano (or Santa Maria del Patir or Patirion or Patiron, the latter being the somewhat unusual form used by the author) and in the monastery of the Holy Savior in Messina. A third area of production was Salento, where the monastery of St. Nicholas of Casole stood out for its activity. The last part of the book focuses on the process that led to the demise of nomocanonical manuscripts in southern Italy. Their production was substantial until when the Greek communities of the Kingdom of Sicily could enjoy the protection of the Norman monarchy from direct interference by the Church of Rome. But in the following century, the Church of Rome began to take away more and more of the autonomy of the monasteries and Greek churches in southern Italy. The papacy demanded their submission to Rome much more strongly than in the past, a tendency that was greatly strengthened by the establishment of the Angevin dynasty in the Kingdom of Sicily in 1266. Since the thirteenth century, the role of controlling the Greek monasteries of southern Italy was increasingly entrusted to the abbots of the Greek abbey of Grottaferrata, founded in 1004 by Neilos of Rossano. This was the direction that led, shortly before 1446, to the foundation of the Order of St. Basil, which had the task of administering the Italian monasteries of the Greek rite subject to the Church of Rome. The volume ends with three appendices, the most useful of which is the first, in which the thirty-six manuscripts that constituted the main source of the book are listed and described.

The volume brings together different academic disciplines and focuses on a specific type of manuscript, which has never been studied as a whole. From the study, it emerges that the production of codices containing Byzantine canon law represented an instrument of identity for the life of Greek communities in southern Italy. The “paideic” value of this legal tradition is not only linked to the transmission of social norms and customs shared by the community, but in some cases it also reflects a proud antagonism with the dogmatic, liturgical, and disciplinary traditions of the Latin church. In view of the fact that the book is also a philological research, it is surprising that at times the author proposes questionable definitions, such as κατɛπανίκιον for the Catepanate of Italy. The term κατɛπανίκιον is attested in Byzantine Greek (cf. TLG, s. v.), but in thirteenth-century sources, it means “small district.” Although the documents of southern Italy have not left us an explicit term in this regard, the linguistic outcome in the modern Italian term Capitanata is hardly compatible with κατɛπανίκιον—much better, as is usually believed, a derivation from *κατɛπανᾶτον, along the lines of δρουγγαρᾶτον. There are, moreover, several typos and Greek errors in the book, especially with regard to the accentuation of words (I shall indicate here only a few: 88, n. 22: τούτο pro τοῦτο; 91, n. 32: ἰνδ[ικτιώνι] pro ἰνδικτιῶνι]; 96, n. 56: Λόγγιβαρδους pro Λογγιβάρδους; 105, n. 25 σ[ώτ]ηρ pro σ[ωτ]ήρ; 167, n. 56: ἐνταύθα pro ἐνταῦθα; 173, n. 19 πρώτος pro πρῶτος, and, at 233, πρῶτη pro πρώτη; 173, no. 19 ἥτοι pro ἤτοι; 174, no. 19 ἀκολούθος pro ἀκόλουθος; 204, n. 66 ἔνɛκɛν pro ἕνɛκɛν; on 163, n. 36, the author writes “ἐν όματι [sic],” where it is undoubtedly “ἐν ὀ(νό)ματι”). One has the impression that the final editing of the volume was a bit hasty. On 136 (“they took the opportunity [etc.]”), the discourse is truncated and “[etc.]” refers to something that was not included. Although the book makes use of many works by a specialist such as Vera von Falkenhausen, the reader would be vain to search for them in the “secondary literature,” where only Taranto in epoca bizantina is quoted in extenso, moreover in an incorrect alphabetical order. But beyond these inaccuracies, the book remains an original and ambitious attempt to reconstruct the history of Greek communities in southern Italy with an unusual perspective, and, as such, it is useful to palaeographers, codicologists, philologists, and historians.