Byzantine Legal Culture and the Roman Legal Tradition, 867–1056

This social history of Byzantine law offers an introduction to one of the world's richest yet hitherto understudied legal traditions. In the first study of its kind, Chitwood explores and reinterprets the seminal legal-historical events of the Byzantine Empire under the Macedonian dynasty, including the re-appropriation and refashioning of the Justinianic legal corpus and the founding of a law school in Constantinople. During this last phase of Byzantine secular law, momentous changes in law and legal culture were underway: the patronage of the elite was reflected in the legal system, theological terms from Orthodox Christianity entered the vocabulary of Byzantine jurisprudence, and private legal collections of uncertain origins began to circulate in manuscripts alongside official redactions of Justinianic law. By using the heuristic device of exploring legal culture, this book examines the interplay in law between the Roman political heritage, Orthodox Christianity and Hellenic culture.

Introduction; 1. The 'cleansing of the ancient laws' under Basil I and Leo VI; 2. Gift-giving and patronage in Middle Byzantine courts; 3. Paradigms of justice and jurisprudence; 4. The function of 'private' law collections in the Byzantine Empire and neighboring cultures; 5. Law and heresy in the edicts of the Patriarch Alexios Stoudites; 6. Legal education and the law school of Constantinople; Conclusions; Appendix: translation of the Novella constitutio.

Zachary Chitwood is a Research and Teaching Associate in Byzantine Studies at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, Germany. He has published on Byzantine law, including the legal status of Byzantine Jews, and foundations/endowments. His scholarship has appeared in the journals Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies and Viator, as well as in The Late Antique World of Early Islam (edited by Robert G. Hoyland, 2015) and the first two of the planned three volumes of the Enzyklopädie des Stiftungswesens in mittelalterlichen Gesellschaften (2014, 2016).