Like London buses, two important English-language studies of early Byzantine Law have now arrived together. Both build on recent German-language scholarship acknowledging the importance both of the commentators of the ‘Frankfurt School’ and the publication of their Repertorium der Handschriften des byzantinischen Rechts. Both are concerned with bodies of texts: in Humphreys' case all the extant legal sources of the 7th-9th centuries; in Wagschal's, the canon-law collections of a somewhat longer period. Both are thus contributions to legal history of the longue durée and both are aware of the questions that historians, rather than lawyers, ask of legal texts. Both seek to place their material in the ‘conceptual world’ of Byzantium.

Humphreys is particularly concerned with the ideological function of law and how it was used to project themes of significance to the iconoclast rulers. After an introduction emphasising the long-standing association of the making of law with the imperial office, he focuses in turn on a series of legal sources: the canons of the Council in Trullo (691-2), the imperial code of the Ekloga (741) and the works associated with the Ekloga in the manuscript tradition (including the so-called Appendix; Nomos Mosaikos; Nomos Stratiotikos; Nomos Nautikos and the Nomos Georgikos). He ends with a short chapter on ‘three reactions’ to what he sees as a coherent ‘Isaurian Project’ of legal codification and reform: the two extant Novels of the Empress Irene; Leo V's law on marriage and the early Macedonian legislation.

Humphreys' detailed summaries of his texts will be particularly welcome to Anglophone readers (as will his announcement that full English translations are forthcoming in the TTB series). They enable him to suggest a process by which the Isaurian Emperors made a series of ideological ‘statements’. The Preface to the Canons of the Council in Trullo positioned Justinian II as the orthodox leader of a ‘holy nation’ and the instigator of a moral reformation of clergy and laity which would lead to the restoration of the Empire. The Ekloga marked a ‘full-scale re-conception of Roman Law’, subsuming Justinianic Law to that of the Old Testament and characterising the Emperor as a reborn Moses or Solomon, reforming society through law and just administration, most significantly though the introduction of state salaries for legal officials and (possibly) through the appointment of ‘sub-provincial legal officials’ (the mysterious akroatai). Humphreys argues that the nomoi usually found together with the Ekloga in manuscripts, although initially produced as separate texts, soon provided a corpus of complementary material which furthered the Isaurian agenda to regulate justice. This is brave stuff, given the controversies surrounding their nature and dating, but Humphreys' tables comparing their subject material with that of the Ekloga certainly give pause for thought. He tends, however, to underestimate the difficulties caused by the late date of the earliest surviving manuscripts (10th c.) and his suggestion that the Ekloga may have been first ‘published’ as a ‘stand-alone pamphlet with 12 folios divided into three quires’ (p. 131) - impossible - is somewhat alarming. He is on safer ground in his concluding chapters, demonstrating how the Macedonians, whilst denigrating their iconoclast predecessors, used law-giving to emphasise imperial power and legitimacy and, indeed, modelled some of their own legislation on that of the Ekloga.

Where Humphreys presents a range of legal material, Wagschal is concerned with an in-depth study of one particular type of source. He begins with a thought-provoking discussion of how we should approach Byzantine law in general and canon law in particular, arguing that we often mistakenly assess them by how far they conform to modern ideas of what law should be. In contrast, he maintains that Byzantine canon law had its own distinctive characteristics, logic and internal coherence. He provides a ‘bird's eye view’ of its development, introducing the main corpus of texts which formed the ‘core tradition’ of the canonical collections and then follows with more specific chapters dealing with their ‘shape’ (the emergence by the 6th c. of a fixed morphology of Prologue, Thematic Index, Corpus of Canons and Appendices); the Prologues to the collections; their language and, finally, their systemization - the process by which canonical texts were moulded into a coherent whole. He is concerned throughout to establish how the canons were used not when they were first issued, but when they were later encountered.

But it is Wagschal's insights into how Byzantines ‘thought’ about these texts which are truly ground-breaking. The canonical collections were essentially florilegic; canons were deemed to have come directly from the mouths of the original legislators, whether they were conciliar, apostolic, patristic or the drafters of civil law (Wagschal is particularly perceptive on the much-discussed issue of definitions of nomos and kanon). Ordering them was a ‘dialectic between hierarchical and chronological’; the canons of the Council of Nicaea, though not the earliest, were given pride of place because of their importance in establishing orthodox belief and all patristic material was placed after the conciliar canons. Even rubrics (an insight of particular value to those dealing with documents, such as typika, which also have them) emerged more or less word-for-word from canonical texts, rather than presenting (as in Western canonical collections) statements to be proved or disproved. All this points towards attitudes of extreme conservatism. Wagschal's discussion of the Prologues to two important canonical collections (translated in an extremely useful Appendix) shows why this is the case. Canon Law (or rather ‘the canons’) formed part of an ‘extra-legal narrative’, heavily influenced by Scripture, in which eternal values of salvation, morality and virtue could be inculcated using language which emphasised their tradition and - in contrast to the vocabulary of chastisement of the civil law - their remedial, even curative purposes. The canons were ‘siblings’ of the civil law and often borrowed from it. But both belonged to a larger, symbolic and eternal world of Law where Hellenistic and Christian philosophies mingled.

Both these works discuss legal material (particularly Prologues) as vital indicators of the ‘thought-world’ of Byzantine legislators and both have important contributions to make to the present ‘law as literature’ debate. Wagschal locates his discussion in the wide geographical context of the Mediterranean world and in the deep philosophical context of debates on the very nature of law. Humphreys re-assesses legal sources which we thought we knew about and makes bold suggestions about how we should use them in any history of the iconoclast period. Students of Byzantine Law should read them together.