Entering the field of Byzantine law

A mosaic with emperor Justinian – Ravenna, San Vitale – source: Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes real or supposed barriers keep you from investigating new subjects. For a long period I saw the sources of Byzantine law as a conglomerate of difficultly accessible sources. On my legal history website Rechtshistorie I scarely mentioned Byzantium and its laws, and to be honest, I was not always aware of this substantial omission. Nowadays algorithms tend to lead your focus to themes and issues, but this time a personal announcement about a new introduction to Byzantine law finally pushed me into adding some lines and references to my webpage on Roman law. On top of that came the question to look again for modern translations of the several components of the Justinian compilation. In this post I will tell you briefly about this new handbook and modern ways to approach Byzantine legal history.

Changing perspectives

When I started studying legal history in the early eighties of the last century three fields captured my attention: Roman law, medieval (canon) law and Old Dutch Law. Only gradually other fields such as the common law came into view, partially guided or seduced by the open stacks of the former law library at the Janskerkhof in Utrecht, a place often mentioned here. For my dissertation the medieval ius commune and its development during the Early Modern period became central in my research. When I looked at the study of the Justinian Digest Byzantine law at last came more into my view, thanks also to the projects of other researchers. At some point I detected the handbook by N. van der Wal and J.H.A. Lokin, Historiae graeco-romani iuris delineatio. Les sources du droit byzantin de 300 à 1453 (Groningen 1985). A month spent in Frankfurt am Main also meant literally coming a bit closer to current research on Byzantine law.

The history of the Byzantine empire or East Roman Empire spans a millennium. and somehow this period remained long at a distance for me, and I guess for many others, too. Judith Herrin’s classic work Byzantium (2007) did reach my bookshelves, but even though she devoted a short chapter to Byzantine legal history I was not pushed into action to update my website. This month I was surprised to reread a brief post from 2010 on my blog with some useful information about Byzantium and its legal sources. At Wikipedia you can now find articles on Byzantine law in various languages, often presenting in some detail the historical development of laws and legislation, but their sections on primary legal sources are often very succinct.

Thanks to Daphne Penna and her kind message last December I looked at the book she published with Roos Meijering, A sourcebook on Byzantine law. Illustrating Byzantine law through the sources (Leiden-Boston 2022). This introduction is also available online, with full access for private and institutional buyers, but with a bibliography in open access. The book of Meijering and Penna is more than just an anthology of well-chosen substantial and representative examples of sources for Byzantium’s legal history. The editors really want to make students and scholars first and foremost enthusiast about Byzantine law. Thus their book is more than only a modern successor to H.J. Scheltema’s Florilegium iurisprudentiae Graeco-Romanae (Leiden 1950).

With Scheltema we see one of the truly great scholars dealing with the sources of Byzantine law. Together with D. Holwerda and N. van der Wal he succeeded in completing the massive new edition of the Basilicorum libri LX (17 vol., The Hague-Groningen 1955-1988). This edition gives both the text of the Basilica and the accompanying scholia (glosslike commentaries) in two separate series. The Dutch translation of the entire Corpus Iuris Civilis has just thirteen volumes.

Last year I did notice the Basilica Online, but my first visit was coloured by the perception this resource was only accssible for subscriberrs and subscribing institutions. I did not want to present it here or at my website as a stand-alone resource for Byzantine law with most of its parts out of reach for casual visitors. Luckily the new handbook acted as a nudge to look at it longer and better. Two important features of the Basilica Online are presented in open access, a bibliography by Th. van Bochove and a new praefatio by B.H. Stolte. If the new anthology with all its qualities does not yet convince you it is possible to find safe guidance to Byzantine legal history these contributions by Van Bochove and Stolte should make you rethink your assumptions about this subject. Both authors do not hide the problems of their field, but their explanations and guiding remarks are illuminating. Stolte stresses the value of the Latin translation offered by Heimbach, and he notes the lack of an overview of the various tituli, some consequences of the separation between text and scholia, and the absence of the promised new Prolegomena in the Groningen edition of the Basilica. This edition depended very much on the use of microfilmed manuscripts, and some important manuscripts came only very late into view.

For my website the challenge was now to find a balance between redoing without any need the efforts for full introductions done by these scholars from Groningen or presenting a succinct but helpful series of commented references to major publications and editions, and assuring the result gives due attention to the work done by scholars working elsewhere, too. Daphne Penna convinced me quickly to present such information on my webpage for Roman law.

In my concise overview I mention in particular modern introductions. For the Basilica I point of course to the modern edition and its online presence, but I point also to a digitized version of the older edition by Heimbach and other German scholars. It seemd logical to create a section with some other sources available in modern editions, and I added references to online resources for finding Greek manuscripts and modern translations of Greek works.

Revisiting translations for Roman law

In January 2022 I assumed my overview of modern translations for Roman law was fairly complete, and thus I perhaps underestimated the value of the idea to provide more translation in European languages, the obvious aim of the project of Bela Pokol (Budapest) who invoked the help of DeepL to create translations into fifteen languages, In my post about his massive enterprise, aiming at contemporary lawyers and less at scholars of Roman law, I tried to establish the merits of DeepL’s translating capacities and to assess the value of Pokol’s translation which has the English translation by Samuel P. Scott as its starting point, not the Latin original. By the way, DeepL deals now with 29 languages, including Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Bahasa Indonesia, but no Latin.

By sheer coincidence Bela Pokol asked me last week to look again at the presence of completed translations for Justinian’s Digest in modern languages. Using resources such as Unesco’s Index Translationum and the Karlsruher Virtual Catalogue I noticed I had not yet added everything I had deemed necessary at my web page. Even the incomplete but most valuable German translation project which reached D. 34 in 2012 was missing. I checked also the library catalogue of the Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie in Frankfurt am Main.

Eventually a second hunt for finding a digital version of the volumes of the Repertorium der Handschriften des byzantinischen Rechts led me inter alia to the French Pinakes portal for Greek manuscripts (IRHT, Paris-Orleans) which mentions among its links the databases of Princeton University Library for tracing digitized Greek manuscripts and modern translations of Byzantine sources. Both databses can be used with a filter for Law. Luckily at Pinakes the the three volumes of the repertory for Byzantine legal manuscripts has been used. It seems the PDF’s of the repertory created by L. Burgmann, A. Schminck, D. Getov and other scholars are now absent at the server of the institute in Frankfurt; I could only retrieve them for the first and third volume. Many volumes of the Fontes Minores series edited in Frankfurt with articles and editions of legal texts are now available online in Göttingen.

You will agree with me that with a fair number of modern introductions in several languages, important online introductory essays and bibliographies in open access, a number of recent editions of legal texts, some of them with translation, and even online access to repertories for (digitized) manuscripts and translations, you can no longer deem Byzantine law completely out of your reach. I can imagine you might feel a bit dazzled by the efforts of eminent scholars. However, surely Penna and Meijering have done their utmost best to infect you with their enthusiasm to embark on your own journey into Byzantium’s legal history. An empire suriving more than one thousand years and covering in some periods large areas of Eastern Europe and ASsia Minor deserves scholarly attention, in particular when you realize the Eastern Roman empire played a key role in transmitting the sources of the classical Roman lawyers.

Jacques Cujas and legal humanism

Portrait of Jacques Cujas – anonymous painting, 17th century – Musée du Vieux Toulouse, Inv 22.5.1 – image Wikimedia Commons

Tracing the influence of famous lawyers is not a straightforward thing. Some scholars were already famous during their life, others exerted a lasting influence through their pupils or by their published works, sometimes only decades after their death. Reputation can be an obstacle to critical assessment of achievements. The recent publication of a monograph about Jacques Cujas (1522-1590) helps to create a new focus on Cujacius and his importance as a lawyer, professor and legal humanist. On March 28-29, 2022 a conference will be held at Paris with a telling title, Jacques Cujas 1522-2022. La fabrique d’un “grand juriste”. In this post I will look at the congress program and look at some aspects of Cujas’ life and work as foundations for his influence, first in France and later in other European countries and beyond Europe.

The importance of biography

Xavier Prévost (Université Bordaux) is responsible for bringing Cujas into the limelight again in this century. After his voluminous thesis Jacques Cujas (1522-1590), Le droit à l’épreuve de l’humanisme, defended in 2012 in Paris, he published Jacques Cujas (1522-1590), Jurisconsulte humaniste (Genève 2015) and a shorter work Jacques Cujas (1522-1590) (Paris 2018) as a part of the series Histoire litttéraire de la France.

A quick search for more information sheds light on the scale of the commemoration of Cujas’ five-hundredth birthday. The platform France Mémoire has created an online dossier for the 2022 activities around Cujas. The Bibliothèque Cujas, the central law library of the Université de Paris, will launch on March 28 a virtual exhibition about Cujas, a most welcome thing. Obviously the link to the online exhibit does not yet function. The physical exhibition at this library well be on display until June 24, 2022. Prévost will hold a lecture in Paris on the theme “La (seconde) Renaissance du droit romain” on March 17, 2022.

The program (PDF) of the conference on March 28-29, 2022, shows a most sensible approach in several layers which also can be helpful to view other legal humanists in Early Modern Europe in different settings. The local approach contains papers looking at some places where Cujas was active, Turin in the paper by Valerio Gigliotti (Turin) and Toulouse in the paper by Florent Garnier (Toulouse). The section on patrimoine (heritage) has the arts and literature as its subject. Jacqueline Lalouette (Lille) will discuss sculptures of Cujas, and Valérie Hayaert (Warwick) will speak about Cujas and the arts. Literature is the theme in the contribution of Stéphan Geonget (Tours). In the international section the reception of Cujas in Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain and the Dutch Republic will be discussed, with papers by Diego Quaglioni (Trento), John Carins (Edinburgh), Rafael Ramis Barceló, (Universitat de las Illes Balears), and Laurens Winkel (emeritus, Rotterdam). The final section on historiography looks at the representation of Cujas in general history, for example in biographical dictionaries during the Ancien Régime, and of course within the field of legal history, Anne Rousselet-Pimont (Paris) will speak about the place of Cujas in the works of the French arrêtistes. Pierre Bonin (Paris) will discuss dictionaries. Géraldine Cazals (Bordeaux) and Anne-Sophie Chambost (Lyon) will confront the theme of Cujas’ authority, in partciual after the French Revolution.

A very active life

The sheer number of themes at this two-day conference in itself is already interesting. What made Cujas so special among French lawyers? Let’s look quickly at the main points of Cujas’ life. Either in 1520 or 1522 he saw the light of life in Toulouse, He studied law in his home town. After teaching in Toulouse from 1547 to 1554 he did not become a professor in Toulouse, and this started a career which brought him to a number of French cities: Cahors (1554), Bourges (1555-1556, 1559-1565, and 1575-1590), Valence (1557-1559 and 1567-1575). In 1575 he taught briefly in Paris, and outside France he lectured in Turin (1566). In Bourges you can visit the Hôtel Cujas, home since 1875 to the Musée de Berry. The variety of cities and his long stay at Bourges pinpoint the fact that he was not just a great successor to Andrea Alciato who had also taught at Bourges, making it into virtually the main French city for legal humanism.

When you start searching for Early Modern printed editions of his works, for example within the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC, St. Andrews) the very first – and quite rare – work called Catalogus legum antiquarum (…) (Paris 1555; USTC no. 154264) has a title showing already the different path he was to follow. A focus on order is clearly visible. Cujas devoted much time to reconstructing the original works of Roman lawyers such as Ulpian. Cujas did not just study the Justinian Digest, Code and the institutes. He published one of the earliest critical editions of the Codicis Theodosiani libri XVI (Lyon 1566; USTC no. 158074). Writing a commentary on the Libri Feudorum was not the next thing you would expect. Among the earliest edition of his De feudis libri V is an edition Heidelberg 1567 (USTC no. 629710). He commented also the Justinian Novellae (first published as Novellarum constitutionum impp. Justiniani expositio (Cologne 1569; USTC no. 678571). Thus Cujas studied the Corpus Iuris Civilis in its full width, but he studied also earlier and later sources for Roman law. He did not bring the first edition of the Basilica, but he certainly drew attention to this importance source of Byzantine law with his Latin translation [Basilikon liber LX (…) (Lyon 1566; USTC no. 154652).

With Cujas you see not just a professor with only interest in Roman law in its original form. Like many other Early Modern law professors he wrote legal consultations and published them, too [Consultationum liber singularis (Cologne 1577; USTC no. 664682)]. However, characteristically he opened his collection with an edition of the Consultatio veteris cuiusdam iurisconsulti, the very editio princeps of this text. I will not mention here any other titles of his works, apart from his Observationes et emendationes, a modest title taken from other humanists expanded in every edition. All in all the USTC gives references to some 180 editions of Cujas’ works, most of them published after his death in 1590. Of course this is just an impression of Cujas’ printed legacy: The USTC stops at 1650, and searching in for example the Heritage of the Printed Book database (CERL) will show you re-editions of his works until the mid-eighteenth century. For Cujas at least four Opera omnia editions exist. It is good to note that Ernst Spangenberg devoted many pages of his study Jacob Cujas und seine Zeitgenossen (Leipzig 1822) to a detailed bibliographical overview of Cujas’ published works.

Cujas taught scholars who became famous in their own right, too. Jacques-Auguste De Thou, Josephus Justus Scaliger, Jacques Labitte, Antoine Loysel, Pierre Daniel, Pierre Pithou and Étienne Pasquier are just some of them. Through Pierre Daniel some of Cujas’ manuscripts came in the hands of Jacques Bongars (1554-1612) whose large library eventually arrived at the Burgerbibliothek in Bern. You might jump to the conclusion all these men occupied themselves mainly with either law or Classical Antiquity, but for example Antoine Loysel (1536-1617) studied in particular French customary law. Étienne Pasquier (1529-1615) was a poet, but also a member of the royal Chambre des comptes.

Influence beyond borders

A Dutch and even Utrecht connection with Cujacius is mentioned by the indefatigable Danish historian Jen Jensen Dodt van Flensburg (1800-1847) who devoted so much energy in unlocking sources for the history of Utrecht. In his article ‘Doctoraal diploma, door Jac. Cujacius in 1586 verleend aan Everard van de Poll, Utrechtenaar’, Bijdragen tot regtsgeleerdheid en wetgeving 5 (1830) 67-69 – online at Delpher – he gives the text of the doctoral degree conferred by Cujas in Bourges to Van de Poll (died 1602). later on the advocate of the States of Utrecht, a benefactor of the city Utrecht with his workhouse and the posthumous gift of his library to the city library, eventually part of the collections of Utrecht University Library. Interestingly this text also mentions Bernardinus de Monte Valdone (died 1618), a student from The Hague, who later on served as the advocaet-fiscael of the Hof van Utrecht, the provincial tribunal. Dodt wrote more about Cujas in another article for the Bijdragen tot regtsgeleerdheid en wetgeving 6 (1831-1832) 1-33.

In Cujas we see a scholar aiming not only to find out about the original order of Roman law, but also preparing new approaches to contemporary law by reinvigorating the study of Roman law, and inspiring numerous students to follow the paths of both law and history as twin subjects. Cujas was able to inspire his own students and later generations with his wide knowledge and deep insights. No wonder he defies easy labeling, and this invites scholars since four centuries to look at his achievements and legacy from many perspectives. The sixteenth century saw in France a galaxy of legal humanists, each of them with distinct qualities taking part of the emerging Republic of Letters, and influencing much else, too, in politics, government and the development of law and justice in their age. Studying legal humanists helps you to rethink approaches of legal history for our time, too.

Translating Justinian’s Digest with DeepL, a multiple challenge

The clivus Capitolinus, the slope of the Capitol Hill in Rome – image Wikimedia Commons

This post is a tale of the unexpected. Last week I received a message about a new translation of the Digesta Justiniani, the famous sixth-century compilation of texts by the classical Roman lawyers. Soon two things became clear: It was not just a single new translation into one particular language, but into a number of languages, and these translations were not the fruit of just one scholar, but mainly the product of the online translation tool DeepL. Béla Pokol, a Hungarian lawyer at the Eötvös Lorand University in Budapest, used the powerful DeepL tool for translating the Digest into fourteen (!) European languages. For this project he had to process some 45,000 pages. You can download the translations as PDF’s from the section Law Working Papers of the online journal Jogelméleti Szemle. Journal of Legal Theory. A cordial exchange of questions and answers with Béla Pokol followed quickly. Here I will look first of all at the Dutch translation, but whenever necessary other languages will figure here, too. I will try to distinguish carefully between the input of DeepL and Pokol’s own efforts.

DeepL takes the plunge

I suppose normally you would use the translation function of the browser created by one of the Big Tech Firms for occasionally translating some information in languages which are clearly out of your range of linguistic capacities. In these cases you get a rough idea of the core of a text, with for example a number of words even left untranslated. The seduction of DeepL’s offer to bring really good translations from and to a great number of sounds for me simply too good to be true. So far I received just once a translation created by DeepL which I ignored completely by going straight for the English original of an article.

Enter Béla Pokol who at the very least has designed a kind of ultimate test for DeepL, translating from a dead language like Latin into modern languages, and not just a general text from classical literature, but the very core text collection of Roman law. Classical Latin has a complex syntax and a rich idiom. The classical lawyers seem to prefer a less rich vocabulary, but their concise and trenchant arguments set a great challenge for translators. To mention just a few modern examples, the Dutch team led by Job Spruit worked between 1993 and 2011 on their translation in twelve volumes of the Digest, Code, the Justinian Institutes and the Novellae [Corpus Iuris Civilis. Tekst en Vertaling]. The German team led by Okko Behrends started in 1995 and reached with the fifth volume published in 2012 only D. 34. The recent project for a version of the Digest with Latin text and an Italian translation was first published in five volumes between 2005 and 2014; the web version was launched in 2017. In 2011 I wrote here a post on recent and older translations for Roman law. At the page for Roman law of my legal history website Rechtshistorie I mention more translations, a number of them available online.

The idea for using DeepL to tackle the intricacies of the Digest came after Pokol had used DeepL to translate his book Juristocracy from English into seven languages, with surprisingly few errors. He enlisted the help of his daughters to deal with the new challenge of the Digest, because he had noticed only a small number of translations of the Digest into modern European languages. Hence the decision to aim at fourteen languages, starting with Hungarian, followed by French, German, Portuguese, Spanish. Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Rumanian, Czech, Slovakian, Slovenian, Polish and Russian. It took Pokol and his daughters a year to produce the 45,000 pages of these translations.

First impressions

For the aim of this post I decided to look first at the translated results, and only afterwards at DeepL. How should one quickly assess the quality of these translations? As a matter of fact many years ago I selected three passages in the Digest for translation into four languages which figure at my legal history website as Exempla iuris Romanorum. D. 4.3.7.10 is a text on fraud, D. 19.2.59 a text about a building agreement, and D. 32.52.3 a text about hereditary law. I add to them the first case from the Digest I ever encountered, D. 9.2.52.2, a case of deadly damage caused by a collision of two carts on the slope of the Capitol. A fifth check was quickly found, too, using the words plumbum, lead, and balneum, bath, both terms frequently used in connection with water, as can be seen in the Topoi database in Berlin on Roman water law discussed here in 2019. As a quick reference I used the Amanuensis tool of Peter Riedlberger and Günther Rosenbaum.

The Dutch translation created by Pokol using DeepL has 3921 pages. The first translation seems really good (p. 261), especially when DeepL succeeds in keeping everything in a single sentence. Spruit and Wubbe, the Dutch team for D. 4, used two sentences in their translation of D. 4.3.7.10. The second example, D. 19.2.59 figures at pp. 1363-1364. Here I hesitate about the building being destroyed (verwoest), the verb concutio does mean to shake heavily. DeepL puts in the word ongeluk as a partial translation of acciderit. The case about a will speaking about books in D. 32.52.3 fares less well (p. 2164). In the first part the word bibliothecas has been translated as bibliotheken (libraries) but it is clear bookshelves are meant. In the second part the word scrinia does not mean writing tables but chests. Some words have more than one meaning, and it is vital to use the one clearly meant in the context of a case.

The case with the mules and two carts on the Capitol hill (D. 9.5.2.2) killing a young slave is somewhat longer than the fragments here above. At first DeepL impressed me with a clear disposition of this complicated case (p. 681). The mule-drivers (muliones) become only once koetsiers, coachmen. However, translating the term lege Aquilia by “Lex van Aquilia” is decidedly odd. This law and another Roman law, with few exceptions, remains in Dutch untranslated. I cannot plod here through every occurrence of the word lead. In D. 32.35.3 the bath of Iulianus becomes the Julianabad (p. 3241), a very early homage to a former Dutch queen, instead of het badhuis van Julianus or het Juliaanse badhuis. Tibur has been left untranslated, but it is clearly Tivoli, and the word scitis has been promoted to Scitis. In the leges preceding this case DeepL has more luck with some difficult names of locations.

A multiple challenge

On closer inspection there are very real problems. The translation of the references to the works of Roman lawyers is a matter of some wonder. The book title membranae is translated as Perkamenten, parchments. Spruit cum suis opt for Notities (Notes). At some point an author Callistratus is mentioned, a name not mentioned at all within the Digest. The title page of the translation provides a clue to the origin of some of these problems. Pokol has not created a translation from the Latin original, but from the English translation by Samuel Scott, The Civil Law, including the Twelve Tables… (17 vol., Cincinnati 1932). This fact alone severely diminishes the value and possible importance of the translation under review here. It does matter much less which faults can be attributed to DeepL or to Pokol since the very starting point is awkward, and not what one would expect someone to do.

In his article ‘The enigma of Samuel Parsons Scott’, Roman Legal Tradition 10 (2014) 1-37 Timothy Kearley devotes pages 29 to 32 to an assessment of the value of Scott’s translation of the Justinian corpus. Reviewers accorded it mostly only value as a introduction for students and as a quick reference tool. Apart from mistakes in his translations they faulted Scott for ignoring the edition by Mommsen and Krüger and generally being less aware of the latest (German) scholarship. Kearley expands his views in his study Lost in Translations. Roman Law Scholarship and Translation in Early Twentieth-Century America (Durham, NC, 2018).

What is the value of Pokol’s efforts? He wrote to me his explicit aim was helping modern lawyers to have “a speedy online help” for Roman law and to make it a living heritage. Alas as a reference tool the current translation is marred by a lack of running titles indicating on each page the title of the Digest. In some titles, in particular D. 50.17, De regulis iuris antiqui, the numbers of the leges are not given correctly. Book 50 ends with leges numbered above 1000. This has simply escaped his attention. Pokol did not include the introductory constitutions and the Index Florentinus. It shows definitely he aims indeed at lawyers in general, and not at students and scholars who want to study Roman law for its own sake. Let it be clear Pokol did not at all attempt to translate the Latin original of the Digest. In his view the Hungarian translation of the Digest by DeepL is quite good.

Looking deeper into DeepL

It brings us to the final question of this post, the value of DeepL for translating classical Latin into any modern European language. DeepL offers currently 26 languages. Apart from European languages only Chinese and Japanese are now included. Arabic, Hindi and Swahili are absent. The inclusion of Finnish and Hungarian, two Finoegrian languages, is remarkable. Polish and Russian, too, are languages with a number of very real difficulties. Swedish and Danish are present as Scandinavian languages. There is simply no Latin to test here with DeepL at the moment of writing. DeepL does succeed in faithfully translating English into Dutch at a notable level for fairly difficult texts as the ones used here as tests. It might make you certainly curious about the way it would work as an assisting tool, for example when translating a textbook for Roman law into another language.

To give DeepL quickly a second chance to prove it can produce something convincingly adequate when faced with a text offering some difficulties I entered the text of my recent contribution ‘A dictionary for the Spanish colonial empire and canon law’ for a translation from English to Dutch. Using the free version of DeepL without a trial period this meant each time only 5,000 signs could be entered, roughly half of my post. The translation of the first half contained only a few problems, and in the second part with many Spanish words these were correctly left untranslated, and only some easily detectable glitches in the syntax occurred.

For your interest – and perhaps consolation! – I looked around briefly for other online translation tools which do include Latin. I found a few websites featuring both Dutch and Latin. Translatiz depends on Google Translate. In its Latin-Dutch translation of D. 32.52.3 the word legatis becomes luitenants, lieutenants. ImTranslator seemed at first to offer besides Google also Microsoft and PROMT for Latin-Dutch, but the two last do not offer this functionality. A search in Dutch for online translating tools made in the Low Countries brought me to Webtran where you get only a word for word translation for Latin-Dutch filled with silly mistakes, and not even clear sentences at all. Opentran and the Dutch version of I Love Translation join the ranks of tools with insufficient qualities for translating legal Latin. Remembering just in time Cicero’s vehement sigh Quousque tandem abutere nostra patientia, Catilina? I will leave it at that for now, even though these tools did solve this particular Latin question correctly.

It is a feat to climb the Capitol Hill of faithful translation from any language and for any subject! No doubt sooner or later an online tool will appear which will be able using artificial knowledge to produce translations from Latin, not only for regular classical texts with their own peculiarities, but also for legal texts. Classicists are keen in using digital humanities to sensible ends. The challenge remains to learn yourself sufficient Latin and to find reliable translations made in years of toil and endless care for details, and secondly to have all necessary capacities for understanding the way Roman lawyers thought, argued and acted. A good translation is an act of interpretation in itself, a necessary foundation for further research. Meanwhile we can benefit from a substantial number of older and newer translations for Roman law. As for having an impact on modern lawyers and legislators the quality and vitality of thinking and writing about law and legal history by legal historians should seduce people to enter the realm of Roman law in all its manifestations through the centuries until now.

Three new databases for Roman law

An aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic affecting scholarly research was and is restricted access to archives, libraries and museums. Online materials became even more important for both teachers and students than they did already before 2020. Classicists have embraced the possibilities of the internet and grasped also the use of digital humanities to widen and deepen their research, and to present the results in often interesting ways. At my blog and website I try to find and follow projects with a connection to legal history. While updating and reassessing the information about Roman law on my website I encountered at least three databases that I had missed earlier on or are simply still rather new. I certainly would like to make here some amends for the times Roman law came only seldom here into view. Apart from a presentation of the three databases I will also briefly mention some of the latest additions to my links list for Roman law. In this year’s Open Access Week it is good to know these resources can be accessed freely.

The Romans and infamy

The first database I would like to present is Infames Romani, the project of Clément Bur hosted at the PoolCorpus platform of the Institut National Universitaire Champollion (Albi-Rodez-Castres). It was a pleasant surprise to find this new element on a platform created for hosting biographical and prosopographical databases which until recently focused on students at French universities, mainly during the Early Modern period. Clément Bur wrote his PhD thesis La citoyenneté dégradée : une histoire de l’infamie à Rome (312 av. J.-C. – 96 apr. J.-C.) (Rome 2018), published by the École française de Rome. The database builds on his thesis concerning citizens whose behaviour or position in society led to marking them or simply made them infamous. People not just lost certain civic rights, they were outright degraded also by humiliating and infamous penalties.

The database with 210 cases distinguishes six penalties, everyone of them with subcategories, and a number of general cases. You can search by name, period, the kind of penalty with additional subcategories. Bur limited his research to the late Roman Republic and the first century of the Roman empire. Entries contain the text or texts mentioning a person and references to scholarly literature. In this introduction to the database Bur explains concisely his scope and aim, his definition of persons affected by infamy. He indicates the main resourced used for his corpus, and he mentions a few specific categories not included.

Among the databases Bur used one deserves some attention here. I wonder how I had not seen earlier on the database for Trials in the Late Roman Republic based on Michael Alexander’s Trials in the Roman Republic 149 BC to 50 BC (1990; 2nd ed., 2007) and extended by him, Tracy Deline and Federico Russo with the cooperation of others. The creation of this website started already in 2014, and because it is not a new database I will mention it only briefly here. The book has been converted both to HTML and XML. You can search the database with an XPath form or with Balbus. A second version of the database is currently work in progress. The TLRR database contains 391 cases, treated very summarily, and thus in this succinct form it has clearly to be consulted in tandem with Alexander’s monograph, available as a PDF at the TLRR website.

Roman bastards, a title with a twist

The team behind the Roman Bastards Database surely has a very sharp definition of Roman bastards, illegitimate children, but I hesitated to put this database here as the first item. Its title might easily be seen by the general public as a project for studying the most horrible Romans with the lowest characters and most brutal manners, the kind of persons figuring as the bad guys in movies with Roman history as its background or pretext. In their database Maria Nowak and Małgorzata Krawczyk of the Uniwersytet Warszawski bring together evidence on illegitimate offspring during the first three centuries of the Roman empire.

This database allows both searching and browsing, the last way not yet for legal sources alas, and you can use the analytical tools section for creating graphs of the occurrence of terms or their geographical distribution. The database contains currently 1828 items. Information about persons is divided over eight fields. Eight other fields contain information about the source for this person, with information about the exact text, the role of the person in the source, its date and provenance, links to online sources and references to scholarly literature. My first impression is that this database allows detailed searching for its subject, with as a bonus when needed links to external resources such as inscriptions and papyri. Some elements are not yet up and running, for example the list of abbreviations. The team scores points with clear user instructions.

A textual database for Justinian’s Digest

The third database in this post comes not as an online relational database, and not even as web pages using PHP or MySQL. For the Justinian Digest Marton Ribrary (University of Surrey, Guildford) has developed in 2020 a relational database which you can download and install yourself. The SQLite database has been written in Python and comes with sample queries. Ribrary developed this database in 2020 clearly to facilitate the integration of the Digest’s text – taken from the well-known Amanuensis app for Roman law – with some other resources, in particular the data created by Tony Honoré about Roman lawyers and their language.

Ribrary notes there are at least five other online versions of the Justinian Digest. He aims at a more structured presentation allowing more than just philological research, but also use as an artificial intelligence resource. In my view it is in the end helpful to be able to access and use texts in different formats. They allow for different approaches. Of course I added to my website the versions of the Digest in online libraries with Latin texts which did not yet figure on it. By mistake Ribrary suggests the Perseus Digital Library has a digital text of the Digesta. The Corpus Iuris Civilis is only part of its catalogue of texts.

A quick look at some recent additions

The typical thing to do with my web page for Roman law was first of all repairing broken links, a never ending task. During searches for correct URL’s I sometimes discover new projects well worth including, too, and this redeems my efforts. The section with the various original texts for Roman law needed a clearer layout. When necessary translations in print have been separated from digital versions.

This month I checked again the DigilibLT: Biblioteca digitali di testi latini tardoantichi created at the Università di Piemonte Orientale. Earlier on no legal texts from Late Antiquity were present at this portal, but in 2020 this has changed. The DigilibLT comes with an Italian and English interface. You can both read – and after registration download – several legal texts as PDF or TEI files. There is a PDF in English with an overview of the texts included and the editions used.

Among online journals for Roman Legal history The Journal of Juristic Papyrology deserved a place. It appears since 1946 and available in open access. In the section with bibliographies I could add TOCS-IN: Tables of Contents of Journals of Interest to Classicists, hosted by the University of Toronto and the Université Catholique de Louvain, an online service with both an English and a French search interface. After adding the first two databases discussed here it was only logical to add the Prosopographia Imperii Romani of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, the database version of the biographical lexicon for the first three centuries of the Roman empire.

My web page ends with a number of online resources and portals helping you to find quickly texts, tools and other materials concerning classical Antiquity. I was much impressed by the commented list presented as Open access resources in 2020 and 2021 by the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, London. The section on law could be a bit more extensive, but for other subjects the choice of links offers a splendid fleet of resources now available in open access, for example for subjects such as epigraphy and papyrology. This list is a good reminder that only by looking wide and far, and sometimes quite close to your own town or country other scholars and institutions make great efforts to help the scholarly community at large. Gaps and omissions can be filled when you look around carefully, but also by the help of kind people alerting others to things that might be of interest to them. I would like to hear, too, about such things! Hopefully this spirit of cooperation will remain a cherished and stable element, too, in the present world where individualism can steer you away from communicating with others.

Gathering graphic evidence on false inscriptions

Doing research in legal history means dealing with facts and theories. Provided you have conscientiously worked with the facts at hand it becomes possible to verify theories. In this century we have to deal also with floods of information, including fake news and faked or unprovenanced sources. Some recent cases about illegal selling of and tampering with ancient papyri have even made headlines. In this post I will look at falsified inscriptions which pose as sources stemming from classical Antiquity. A team of scholars from the Università degli Studi di Bari, Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice and the Università La Sapienza in Rome has created the Epigraphic Database Falsae (EDF). What does this database contain? How are materials presented? What does it bring for (legal) historians? When useful in the context of this post I will look at some other projects in epigraphy, the study of inscriptions.

Defying a first look

Perhaps it is worth telling how I found out about this project. The EDF project is included in an overview of projects in the field of digital humanities at the website of the Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (AIUCD), the Italian association for digital humanities and digital culture. At the portal Digital Classicist you can find more about the project. One of the aims of the project team is to integrate EDF with other online resources for epigraphy. EDF is already searchable through the EAGLE portal, an Europeana project for inscriptions, but it will also be connected with the Epigraphik Datenbank Clauss / Slaby (EDCS), one of the main online portals for epigraphy, accessible in five languages. A query for falsae at Charles Jones’ blog Ancient World Online brought me both to EDF and to a volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) founded by Theodor Mommsen. The sixth volume of CIL contains the Inscriptiones urbis Romae Latinae, and its fifth part is devoted to Inscriptiones falsae (Berlin 1885). You may consult this part online at the Arachne portal. Unfortunately the online version of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum created by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften does not function completely at present; for the volume CIL VI,5 you are led to the Arachne portal.

The website of the Epigraphic Database Falsae does not lead you to any explanation about its aim and functioning. For this you must turn to the description at the Digital Classicist. Let’s therefore proceed to the search interface which is only in Italian. You can search by the ID of an inscription, by ancient city, by the text of an inscription and by bibliographical information. Interestingly you can also exclude towns, texts and bibliographical data. You can turn on a search for Greek texts, too.

By clicking on the button Ricerca avanzata more search fields become visible. In fact my screenprint does only show the first half of the thirty search fields. First of all you can search for items with a TM number in the Trismegistos database, and for items with a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). You can search here for example for modern country and city, the place of production, the name of the forger, the present location, material and dimensions, religion, social category, type of forgery, diplomatic transcription and the use of a particular kind of versification, to mention just a few of them. Here, too, you can narrow your search by excluding one or more terms. For a number of fields you can choose from a dropdown list. When you look for a particular type of forgery you can choose from seven categories, including also a partial copy of a genuine inscription.

Of course the best thing to do is to test the database by searching for some forgeries, but this was not as as easy as I had expected. At first I tried to find information about the Fibula Praenestina (TM 256173, EDCS-19600767), but this object which was long suspected to be a forgery, is now viewed as a genuine object from the seventh century BCE. Entering Roma as the ancient city led me to some 250 examples. EDF000151 is a forgery by Placido Scamacca in Catania, first mentioned between 1746 and 1750, who followed as his model a genuine inscription in Rome. The EDF entry leads you in this case also to this inscription in the Epigraphic Database Rome. It is good to note that at EDR118156 the inscription at Catania is not mentioned; I saw also a case where a forgery, also from Catania, is mentioned in EDR as a “copia moderna”. EDR shows images of inscriptions, and even thought they are in black and white, this is something you would like to have also for items in EDF.

I hoped to find some of the false inscriptions from CIL VI,5, but it seems they have yet to be added, or I might not have tried to find them in the right way. I also searched in vain for the text of the inscription on the drawing of the vase on the start screen. The thing to note in EDF is the attention to the actual place of conservation and the cataloging by institutions of individual inscriptions. EDF notes carefully who edited an entry and when.

Integrating epigraphic data

This is not my first post with double numbering for ancient inscriptions. Last year I included an inscription with the Lex Flavia Irnitana in a post on Roman water law, and a few years ago I looked here in a post at the project Hispania Epigraphica. In fact the last years epigraphic scholars have become very much aware of the ways not only to refer to a particular inscription, but also of the ways inscriptions are described. Working with digital resources has made this need even more acute. For epigraphy EpiDoc: Epigraphic Documents in TEI-XML has become a standard for formatting information about inscription. At Epigraphy.info you can follow the latest developments for the integration of a large number of epigraphic databases. There is a real difference in representation on a simple webpage coded in HTML, information encoded using XML following the EpiDoc guidelines, and storage along the rules of RDF (Resource Description Framework). Among the books which provide you with background about such developments is the volume with essays edited by Monica Berti, Digital Classical Philology. Ancient Greek and Latin in the Digital Revolution (ePUB and PDF’s for single articles in open acccess, 2019); a bit more attention to inscriptions would have been most welcome.

In view of the sometimes rapid developments in digital humanities it is necessary to be aware having reliable (online) editions of the text of inscriptions is one thing. It is wise to look for inscriptions not just at one portal or to rely on one particular database. Often they are strengthened by rich bibliographies, but integrating them with images and linked data is currently very much work in progress or projects for the future. Of course it would be wonderful to have already now a single epigraphic gateway, but we have to reckon with different needs and technological possibilities. In this respect facing the very real questions of those scholars who want to investigate forged inscriptions is a reminder research questions and objects can be quite different from your usual approach. The blog Current Epigraphy will help you to stay tuned with the field of the study of inscriptions from classic Antiquity.

Streams of life and strife: Water as a legal matter in Roman law

After six months I should finally fulfill my promise to honor here at least once a year the role of Roman law. You might almost call it the mother of all legal history! Luckily I found a subject in Roman law close to current interests. Water as a vital element of life was not absent in Roman law. Its presence is in fact manifold. The project Roman Water Law at the Freie Universität and the Humboldt Universität in Berlin helps to look at regulations concerning water and its uses according to an interesting scheme. Legal attention to water has a very long history.

A Roman look at water

The project Roman Water Law has found space on the Topoi platform which stands out for its distinctive graphic design. Topoi currently contains nearly twenty research collections and smaller projects on a variety of themes. Actually the website for Roman water law is the fruit of two research programs of the Berlin Exzellenzcluster Topoi held between 2012 and 2017, “Water from a legal perspective” and “Infrastructures from judicial, gromatic and political perspectives”. The core of the virtual collection is a combination of legal sources found in the Corpus Iuris Civilis, three individual leges (laws) and the Codex Theosodianus with texts from Roman authors who touched the subject of water. The results are 572 entries with a Latin text and English translation to which one of ten newly defined categories have been assigned.

Table IX of the Lex Irnitana – Museo Arqueológico de Sevilla – image: Red Digital de Colecciones de Museos de España, http://ceres.mcu.es

The harvest for Roman laws in the technical sense, leges approved by the senate of the Republic, may seem meagre with just three laws. However, one of them, the Lex Flavia Irnitana from AD 91, was only found in 1981. The fragments of six out of originally ten bronze tables are now held at the Museo Arqueológico in Seville (Hispania Epigraphica, no. 5058). This law, dated around 91 BC, is the most complete surviving example of a Lex Flavia, a municipal law. Chapter 82 of the Lex Irnitana deals with drainage and creating and changing roads, paths, canals and sewers, for which only the duumviri, a pair of magistrates elected for one year, are authorized if there is a municipal decree for their actions.

When you look at the overview of the 572 entries you can use first of all several filters. Thus you will quickly see that legal texts form the majority of the texts, only 73 items stem from Roman literature. Within the corpus of legal text the Digesta rule supreme with 435 entries. Among the sources from literature are 22 entries from Frontinus. Cicero provides only six entries. Texts found in the Corpus agrimensorum have been cited and translated using the work of Brian Campbell, The writings of the Roman land surveyors. Introduction, translation and commentary (London 2000). It is no surprise to find Okko Behrends as one of the scholars involved with the Topoi project. He edited and translated with Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi for example the volumes on Frontinus and Hyginus in the Corpus agrimensorum romanorum [vol. 4 (1998) and 5 (2000)]. You can also filter by keyword. Some forty Latin terms are given for this purpose. An entry can have multiple keywords. You can choose to open the entries for just one keyword or add entries for other keywords or subjects as well.

The core of the project are the classifications added to each entry. There are ten main types of classes, starting with definitions (44), followed by

Right to use water
Constructions to use water – Process of construction and maintenance
Legal protection of water use
Urban praedial servitudes of water
Regulation of damages and prevention of damage caused by water
Consequences of changes caused by water
Water as a route of transport
Water as a border
Buildings at banks, coasts and beaches

Under the heading Urban praedial servitudes five texts are included concerning stilicidium, the right to discharge eavesdrip (drops of rain) and the legal actions available in case of flooding (flumen). I could not help noticing that seemingly the keyword flumen has been added to the three texts for stilicidium, and that in one of the two texts for flumen the action concerning aqua pluvia is also mentioned, but not entered as a keyword. Adding the right keywords is certainly not straightforward. I looked also at the twelve texts in rubric 7.4, Storms and natural disaster, a subspecies of changes caused by water. The clear distinctions, the crisp style and the concise descriptions of standard situations should provide food for thought for any modern lawyer struggling with legal problems and trying to write about them in a most sensible and understandable way. In Roman eyes the actual situation in a particular legal case had to be faced squarely in order to provide a just solution. Last year someone asked me about Roman law and plumbing. I can reassure my acquaintance Roman lawyers said some very constructive things about plumbeae fistulae.

It is possible to download the database of Roman Water Law, created in the special Citable format created for digital humanities. It would have been more elegant to indicate the kind of tool to open it. On a tablet I could open it directly, otherwise you can use a simple text or code editor.

The variety at Topoi

The Topoi project does not only bring digital results. Exhibitions are held and publications appear in print, too, for example the volume edited by Jonas Becking on Water management in ancient civilizations (Berlin 2018). An earlier publication touches the theme of Roman land surveying, Cosima Möller and Eberhard Knobloch (eds.), In den Gefilden der römischen Feldmesser. Juristische, wissenschaftsgeschichtliche, historische und sprachliche Aspekte (Berlin-Boston 2013). There is also an e-Topoi Journal for Ancient Studies available in open access. Received wisdom forbids me to create in this post also a nutshell guide to other relevant institutions in Berlin for the field of ancient studies. Just looking at the Topoi repository is a treat. You can look for example at ancient cylinder seals in 3D, astronomical diaries in cuneiform inscriptions from Babylonia, a digital representation of the Pantheon, and the Inscriptiones Christianae Graecae. The Topoi cluster itself has many connections. With the Berliner Antike-Kolleg I mention an institution which has close connections to Topoi.

I leave it to you to explore yourself more texts included at Roman Water Law. Many uses of water come into view on the website and in the database. One of the few things missing are baths, but here we clearly enter the summertime of the northern hemisphere. Roman lawyers did discuss them, too! If you want to pursue such themes in Roman law I would like to point here again to Amanuensis, the application for searching Roman legal texts created by Peter Riedlberger and Günther Rosenbaum, downloadable for both computers and smartphones. In an earlier post I introduced the app. It is good to know more texts have been included in it recently (version 4.0). Thanks to Ingo Maier a number of constitutions from Late Antiquity and the Latin Novellae of Justinian have been added, and thanks to Job Spruit also the Justinian Novellae in Greek. Hopefully the summer holidays give you a chance to relax and reload, and also to learn about and upload the latest version of such tools.

A postcript

The waters of the city of Rome are the subject of the interactive map and database of Aquae Urbis Romae (University of Virginia). Alas the use of Adobe Flash has been discontinued in 2021, but you can view a map of Rome from 1551.

Guillaume Budé, a (legal) humanist

How did the interest in the history of Roman law start in Early Modern Europe? In the Middle Ages scholars who got access to the famous Codex Florentinus, a sixth-century manuscript with the text of Justinian’s Digest, for centuries hold at Pisa, did notice the Greek elements. We call the scholars who started to study Classical Antiquity and literature in its full depth and width humanists. The Renaissance in Italy spread quickly to other parts of Europe. In France Guillaume Budé (1468-1540) quickly became one of the foremost humanists. From May 3 to 5, 2018 an international congress will be held in Paris with the glorious title Les Noces de Philologie et de Guillaume Budé. L’œuvre de Guillaume Budé au prisme du savoir humaniste cinq siècles et demi après sa naissance. How did philology and Budé come together? In this post I will look at this upcoming scholarly event, and at Budé and his heritage.

A versatile scholar

The sections of the congress in May 2018 will look at different themes. The first section focuses on Budé’s mastery of Greek and his contributions as a Hellenist. In the second section scholars will discuss how Budé read not only works by Classical authors, but also by his contemporaries. Legal humanism and politics are the central theme of the third section. Budé as an author and especially the creator of dictionaries comes into focus in the following section. The fifth section is devoted to a single book, De asse, the model monograph of Budé about Roman coins and much more. A section concerning the reception of his works and Budé’s afterlife and reputation will close the congress.

In the section on legal humanism scholars will tackle various subjects and questions. Patrick Arabeyre will discuss to what extent more traditional lawyers in the first half of the sixteenth century were influenced by legal humanists and their books in their own works. In a way this is a paper about the importance of the mos gallicus, the nickname for the new approach to law associated with French humanists. It is good to keep in mind that some Italian lawyers, in particular Andrea Alciato, taught also in France. The Annotationes in XXIV libros Pandectarum and the traces of Budé’s developing views are the subject of a paper by Jean Céard. Decades ago Douglas Osler already fulminated against those scholars who without any reflection took any nearby copy of this work as their only source, see his articles ‘Budeaus and Roman law’, Ius Commune 13 (1985) 195-212, and ‘Turning the title page’, Rechtshistorisches Journal 6 (1987) 173-182. Michel-Dominique Couzinet will look at philosophy and history in the Institution d’un prince, his only work in French. Guillaume Budé and Thomas More’s Utopia are the theme of a paper by Michel Magnien. This section just happens to be the only one with exclusively French speakers.

Portrait of Guillaume Budé by Jean Clouet (died 1540) – painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York – image Wikimedia Commons

A quick look at Budé – or Budaeus, the latinized form of his name – learns you that he was indeed a towering figure. He translated Plutarch from the Greek. His Commentarii linguae Graecae led the foundation for Estienne’s Thesaurus linguae Graecae, the first major Greek dictionary. Budé was a secretary of king Louis XII, and was later close to François I for whom he created a library at Fontainebleau with a collection of Greek manuscripts that would later become the core of the modern Bibliothèque nationale de France. In 1530 he was one of the founders of the Collège de France, first named Collège Royal. As a royal officer Budé was chosen in 1522 to serve a year as prevôt des marchands in Paris, a function in which he had to deal with commerce in Paris and the powerful Parisian merchants. His study of Roman coinage in De Asse was not only a vehicle for showing his skills as a scholar of ancient numismatics, but in this work he wanted to gain and show insight in Roman culture and society. A French summarized translation appeared in 1523 [Sommaire ou epitome du livre de asse (Paris: Galliot du Pré, 1522 (=1523))]. Budé would not have been a true humanist without an extensive correspondence with other humanists from Étienne Dolet and François Rabelais to Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More.

Budé’s reputation and reception

A society active in France for the promotion of editions and translations of Classical texts has the appropriate name Association Guillaume Budé. You can find its journal, the Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé, online at the Persée portal, from its start in 1923 up to 2015. The Institute d’Histoire et Recherche des Texts (IRHT) in Paris and Orléans has created a database concerning the transmission of ancient and medieval texts with an acronym, Base Unique de Documentation Encyclopédique, BUDE, which you can access after registration. It is astonishing Budé figures with only two editions of his works, but luckily two 1543 editions of the Annotationes are among the books digitized in Les Bibliothèques Virtuelles des Humanistes (Université de Tours), a project which figured here in 2013.

Speaking of digital libraries, the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC, University of St. Andrews) will show more than 300 titles of works and editions by Budé. Increasingly the USTC contains links to digitized versions of sixteenth and seventeenth-century books. In the database BP16: Bibliographie des éditions parisiennes du 16e siècle of the BnF, based on the bibliographical work of Philippe Renouard and Brigitte Moreau, Budé figures with 65 works printed in Paris in the sixteenth century, i.e. editions, single publication and works of authors with whom he was associated. Humanists often wrote prologues, poems and recommendations which authors included in their publications.

As for Budé and his work on the Justinian Digest I would not dare to say here anything without first at least mentioning the last study of the late Hans Erich Troje, “Crisis digestorum”. Studien zur historia pandectarum (Frankfurt am Main 2011). Troje died on October 11, 2017. Since his 1971 book Graeca leguntur Troje patiently studied the way humanist scholars looked at the sources of Roman law. The ways the Digest was viewed and studied developed in an intricate interplay of preparations for new editions of the text in the Codex Florentinus, a most complex manuscript, and reading and valuing both published editions and commentaries by leading humanists. Access to the venerable manuscript in Florence and to Angelo Poliziano’s notes about it proved crucial. A few years ago I was happy to summarize here the excellent introduction to the Pandette manuscript and its history by Davide Baldi who shows you nicely the difficulties facing you when you want approach and understand this precious manuscript.

It would go beyond the scope of this post to look systematically at recent publications about Budé, but I cannot resist mentioning here an edition of some of his letters in La correspondance de Guillaume Budé et Juan Luis Vives, Gilbert Tournoy (ed.) (Leuven 2015). Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie and Luigi-Alberto Sanchi published a volume with articles under the title Guillaume Budé, philosophe de la culture (Paris 2010). The title and contents show nicely the many ways one can view Budé and the high esteem he still enjoys. The Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé is a sure port of call to find new studies, notes about sources and reviews of recent publications. In many cases you will Budé encounter anyway when you study the spread of humanism and its very particular offspring, legal humanism. His broad interests, the depth of his learning and the size of his network are probably too daunting for scholars to embark on a full biography of this remarkable figure. If anyone nowadays is able to take up this challenge you will soon think of Anthony Grafton. He showed more than a passing interest for Budé in his study Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997). After his books on Scaliger and Casaubon Budé would seem an obvious choice for a sequel. Hopefully the conference in Paris will bring new and interesting views, and perhaps the spur for a much needed monograph on Budaeus.

A true professor: Knut Wolfgang Nörr, legal historian and lawyer

In the midst of all kind of things, not only preparing new posts for this blog, I read news which made me pause for thought, and more than that. It is truly sad to hear that Knut Wolfgang Nörr passed away on January 15, 2018. Last week Thomas Duve, one of the directors of the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main, wrote a brief message about Nörr’s death on the institute’s website. At the university of Tübingen his colleague Jan Schröder wrote a somewhat longer but still very concise in memoriam with however a very full treatment. In fact it is hard to believe you can tell anything about him with so few words. When you look at the enlarged version of the portrait photo it is even more striking how he looked almost unchanged over the years. Here I would like to share a few of my memories of meeting Professor Nörr many years ago, and I will briefly look at his work in the field of medieval canon law. I am sure they show sides of him which are equally telling about his person, his life and achievements as a scholar as more profound obituaries which he truly deserves.

A true professor

Jan Schröder succeeds wonderfully in creating a most lively image of Knut Wolfgang Nörr (1935-2018), a man of many gifts. Legal historians tend to see him as a major specialist in the field of medieval canon law, but he made also important contributions to the study of contemporary German law. It was Stephan Kuttner who guided his first research in the field of medieval ecclesiastical law, resulting in his first book around a theme connected with the Council of Basel, Kirche und Konzil bei Nicolaus de Tudeschis (Panormitanus) (diss. Munich 1960; Cologne 1964). Nörr used here the person of the Sicilian canonist Niccolò de Tedeschi (1386-1445) as a focus for a study of views on the balance between church and councils. His versatility became soon visible in his Habilitationsschrift on the position of judges within Early Modern legal procedure, Zur Stellung des Richters im gelehrten Prozess der Frühzeit: Judex secundum allegata non secundum conscientiam judicat (Munich 1967). Nörr became in 1966 a professor at Bonn, and went in 1971 to Tübingen where he would stay despite several alluring calls from other universities.

Combining the history of legal procedure and medieval canon law became a hallmark of his work, but he was equally equipped to study the history of German law, for example with a pioneering study of private law during the Weimar Republic, Zwischen den Mühlsteinen : eine Privatrechtsgeschichte der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen 1988), and crowned with a study on the history of economic law in post-war Germany, Die Republik der Wirtschaft : Recht, Wirtschaft und Staat in der Geschichte Westdeutschlands (2 vol., Tübingen 1990-2007). The results of his research were published also in a steadily flow of articles, a number of those concerning civil procedure were republished in the volume Judicium est actus trium personarum : Beiträge zur Geschichte des Zivilprozessrechts in Europa (Goldbach 1993).

In the field of medieval canon law he looked in particular at the way the papacy used law, not only in papal decretals, letters with decisions by papal delegates, usual bishops or abbots, but also at the courts of the papal curia in Rome. Looking at the titles of his articles and their sequence it shines through how he delved new roads to look at the relevant sources. The importance of his work on medieval procedure is perhaps most visible in the creation of the series Der Einfluss der Kanonistik auf die europäische Rechtskultur, Orazio Condorelli et alii (edd.) (4 vol., Cologne-Weimar-Vienna 2009-2014) in which three volumes deal with legal procedure. Thanks to Knut Wolfgang Nörr the very substantial role of canon law in legal procedure is taken into account in any study of the history of legal procedure, an achievement very much also following his teacher Stephan Kuttner who stressed the role of medieval canon law for criminal law.

Some personal notes

I had promised you not to look only at the publications of Knut Wolfgang Nörr, but seeing this overview helps you to understand what a towering figure he was, certainly in the eyes of a young graduate student. In summer 1991 I came to Tübingen for a period of research for my Ph.D. thesis. My second supervisor, Alain Wijffels (Leiden and Louvain-la-Neuve) had helped me to get support from the university of Tübingen. I had made an appointment at the law faculty, but I was not quite prepared for what happened next. Nörr welcomed me friendly, assuming I would defend my thesis at Leiden University, quod non, but after telling him about my purpose and study plan he did something else, too. He gave me the name of a student assistant whom I could contact for practical matters, and he walked me to the university library. In a seemingly old-fashioned but very effective way he introduced me to the staff of the department for rare books and manuscripts. Twenty-five years ago the electronic library catalogue at Tübingen was still in an early phase, and not all old works had yet been entered. Therefore he handed me the old hand written catalogue of legal books, and urged me to look it through completely before starting with reading specific medieval and Early Modern works.

To illustrate the riches of Tübingen’s university library for legal history Nörr told me a story about another visitor. On a certain occasion he had taken Domenico Maffei, a connaisseur of old legal books, to the library stacks, and left him with the old legal books. After half an hour Nörr looked for Maffei, and found him still between the stacks, murmuring again and again: “Scandalo, scandalo!”. “What is the scandal?”, Nörr asked him, and Maffei answered the scandal was not the stunning presence of many rare books, surprisingly often with more than one copy, but the fact this collection had survived the ages and now was only seldom used.

I spent part of the following summer again in Tübingen to benefit from the rich holdings of the university library. For at least one particular genre of Early Modern legal books it would be impossible to write its history without taking the collections at Tübingen into consideration, but it is closer to the truth to say that only the Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen made me thinking about this genre. I hope to follow and complete my investigations. Most of all, I cherish the foundations I could lay for such research thanks to the gentle support of Professor Nörr and the efforts of the library staff.

A second loss

While musing about my fond memories I remembered another thing. Knut Wolfgang Nörr belonged to a family with three of Germany’s best lawyers, a Dreigestern (three-star). Last year Dieter Nörr (1931-2017), too, passed away. In my Munich years I worked at the Abteilung B for German and Bavarian legal history of the Leopold-Wenger-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte, but luckily I was also in touch with the department for the legal history of Classical Antiquity in its fullest extent. Dieter Nörr, his colleagues and the marvellous library for ancient law ensure that yearly many young scholars come to Munich. For me it was striking to see during the famous Roman law seminar the similarities between the two brothers, in particular his humility and humour in admitting something was too difficult for him to solve. The In Memoriam on the institute’s website says infinitely more about him.

A true professor inspires not only by his research, teaching and publications, but with his whole person, his behaviour and way of living. Knut Wolfgang Nörr set an example of questioning existent views, immersing himself in the matters at stake and charting new territories, and perhaps above all, taking interest in people and sharing his curiosity and wisdom. Even in the few times I met him these qualities were visible. The community of legal historians has lost again one of its giants. Let’s keep alive the sparkle that lived so strong in Knut Wolfgang and Dieter Nörr!

A postscript

On April 12, 2019 the Universität Tübingen held a memorial session. The three papers of this session with an introduction by Jan Schröder have been published online in the Fokus section of the journal Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History 28 (2020).

On studying the Theodosian Code

It is a good tradition to start here every year with a post about Roman law. Sometimes a new resource deserves attention, but this year I want to look at a text, the Theodosian Code, because it will be at the heart of a three-week course at Pavia with the title The Theodosian Code: Complilation, Transmission, Reception. The week is hosted by the center CEDANT (Centro di studi e ricerche sui Diritti Antichi) from January 8 to 26, 2018 at the Collegio Ghislieri. The course will be led by Detlev Liebs (Universität Freiburg) and Dario Mantovani (Università degli Studi di Pavia). In particular the partial tradition of the Codex Theodosianus has been the subject of investigation. Only a part of its text has survived the centuries in its original form, and a critical tradition arrived only belatedly. The edition in 1905 by Theodor Mommsen and Paul Meyer did not solve all riddles. The participants of the course in Pavia have the chance to hear about the latest developments in scholarly research from the very scholars who delve into this work of legislation from Late Antiquity. In this post I propose to create a kind of nutshell guide to the current state of knowledge.

New knowledge about an old text

Modern research does of course not lose sight of the critical edition published by Mommsen and Meyer, Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis et leges novellae ad Theodosianum pertinentes (2 vol., Berlin 1905), but we tend to look in this century first to its availability online. Only its first volume in the Internet Archive is everywhere accessible online without having to use a U.S proxy. Perhaps you want to start 2018 with finally using this and similar tools. Klaus Graf explained a few days ago again concisely how to start using a proxy for Hathi Trust. For quick reference one can turn to the digitized version with only the text at The Latin Library. We will see to which source the cross references in this online edition point. Another quick way to the text is provided by the invaluable Amanuensis app of Peter Riedlberger and Günther Rosenbaum, introduced here in 2015. You can run his program also on your computer. There is no excuse nowadays for not giving references to the main text of Roman law. Clyde Pharr’s The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions: A Translation with Commentary, Glossary, and Bibliography (Princeton, NJ, 1952) provides you with a helpful translation in English of this code which assembled acts of Roman legislation between 311 and 437 AD.

Paul Krüger (1840-1926) could only publish an edition of the books I-VIII of the Codex Theodosianus (2 vol., Berlin 1923-1926). He would surely have pursued this path, but he died before he could achieve this. In an earlier post I looked at his legacy, in particular at his papers hold at the Library of Congress. Krüger had worked together with Mommsen on a complete edition of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, but Mommsen decided to finish his own edition of the Codex Theodosianus without even mentioning Krüger on the title page of the edition.

Having access to a text is one thing, approaching it in the right way is another. Probably the best way to start is to go to the version in the Roman Law Library created by Yves Lassard and Aleksandr Koptiev at the Université Grenoble-Alpes. Here the Constitutiones Sirmondianae and other texts are clearly distinguished from the main body of the Theodosian Code. The code came into force in 438 AD. Lassard and Koptiev give in separate sections the text of the Gesta Senatus Romani de Theodosiano publicando and the Leges novellae ad Theodosianum pertinentes. They also guide you to the digital version created at Lille of the Leipzig 1736-1745 edition of the version published by Jacques Godefroy (1587-1652). They point in their digital library correctly to a digitized version in the Internet Archive of the second volume of the Mommsen-Meyer editions with the Theodosian Novellae.

As a student I was intrigued by the title of the Constitutiones Sirmondianae. Jacques Sirmond (1559-1651) was a French Jesuit who published editions of many early medieval ecclesiastical authors. His fame for later generations rests upon his editio princeps in Appendix Codicis Theodosiani novis constitutionibus cumulatior (…) (Paris: Cramoisy, 1631, online, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome) of a number of missing constitutions in the editions that had appeared until his time. Of course the fame of this edition is a relative thing: you will see that only the German Wikipedia article for Sirmond mentions it.

Centuries of scholarship

With Godefroy and Sirmond we entered the field of legal humanism and erudite scholarship, and we have to note another thing that somehow is not always clear. The textual tradition of the sources of Roman law rests only for a small part on inscriptions and papyri from Classical Antiquity. Medieval manuscripts and Early Modern editions are very important. Earlier scholars might have seen manuscripts that no longer exist or are mutilated. Sometimes manuscripts were simply destroyed after the printer had finished an edition.

Late Antiquity is the perspective of the Projet Volterra at University College London, named in honour of Edoardo Volterra (1904-1984), with the Law and Empire AD 193-455 (“Project Volterra I”) database which helps you to search efficiently for laws concerning particular subjects or from a particular emperor. The section Early Medieval Texts is a fair attempt to create a nutshell portal for early medieval legal history, and the parallel section Resources for Roman law is perhaps even better, with for example a section for online journals and an overview of online contents of other journals. You might want to look also at the website Roman Empire of Simon Corcoran, one of the main scholars in Projet Volterra. Sadly the link to the Projet Volterra version of books 1 to 8 of the Theodosian Code does not work currently.

It should not be a complete surprise to find ample information about both the Codex Theodosianus and the Constitutiones Sirmondianae also at the website of a project concerning early medieval law, the Bibliotheca legum: Eine Handschriftendatenbank zum weltlichen Recht in Frankreich led by Karl Ubl (Universität Köln). The project website can be consulted in German and English. In the Bibliotheca legum Ubl and his team give concise introductions to a number of early medieval laws, in particular the so-called Völkerrechte (“Law of Peoples”). The first part of the Theodosian Code (books I-V) has been transmitted to us only in the Lex Visigothorum Romana, sometimes called the Breviarium Alaricianum – hence the reference to Brev. in the version of The Latin Library – and its abbreviated versions, with pride of place for the Epitome Aegidii, first edited in 1517 by Pieter Gillis. You can read more about this Flemish scholar in a post I wrote in 2016 around him and Thomas More’s Utopia. By now it is clear that dealing with the Theodosian Code means entering a constellation of related texts. The Bibliotheca legum leads you to existing editions of texts, to a current bibliography and to the manuscripts containing a particular text. Both for the older editions and the manuscripts you can often go to a digitized version. Ubl points to seventeen manuscripts for the Theodosian Code and ten manuscripts for the Constitutiones Sirmondianae. For the Lex Visigothorum Romana and its abbreviated forms 105 manuscripts are mentioned, and you will find even articles published in 2016 and 2017.

Studying the Codex Theodosianus is an international affair. Among the studies after 2000 Ubl mentions for example John F. Matthews, Laying down the law: a study of the Theodosian Code (New Haven, CT, 2000), A.J.B. Sirks, The Theodosian Code. A Study (Studia Amstelodamensia 39; Friedrichsdorf 2007) and the late José María Coma Fort, Codex Theodosianus. Historia de un texto (Madrid 2014), a study which you can download as a PDF. There is an updated version (2017) of the very useful article by Detlev Liebs, “Codex Theodosianus”, in: Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte 1 (2nd ed., 2008) col. 868-870) in the scholarly repository of the Universität Freiburg.

In this post I focused on the transmission and reception of the Codex Theodosianus. During the seminar at Pavia there will be attention also for the redaction of this code of law, with due attention to inscriptions and papyri, too. Boudewijn Sirks and Simon Corcoran will be among the scholars who will teach at Pavia a public of talented and hopefully most attentive students and graduate students about the latest findings and views concerning one of the great attempts in Late Antiquity to bring as much Roman laws together as humanly possible. As for myself, I learned at the very least a few things that needed to be added or corrected to the Roman law page of my legal history website Rechtshistorie. More importantly, I was most happy to see how a line of research starting with Johann Sichard, Jacques Godefroy and Jacques Sirmond through Gustav Haenel and Carlo Baudi di Vesme to Mommsen and Krüger is clearly kicking and alive in this century. Seeing the continuity, the disputes and new starts is a good thing!

A meeting of laws in ancient Egypt

In December 2009 I started my blog on legal history, and every year I look back in particular to see how far I succeeded in “spanning centuries and continents”, a phrase I used in an early post. The number of gaps and omissions is perhaps not as large anymore as I had feared, but some subjects and themes seem to escape my attention, or they are definitely outside my range. This week I encountered a subject which reminded me how historians can avoid a subject not only for some sound technical reasons, but also like a kind of elephant in the room, very visible but nevertheless almost not to be mentioned. When studying Roman law we long to see its influence everywhere in the Roman world, but there is a state of mind in the Roman world we do not often mention, the awe of the Romans for Greek culture. A redesigned website about contracts in Greek law can perhaps help to put the balance right. Ancient Greek law seldom figures here, another reason to look at this interesting project.

Ancient Greek law

How should one approach ancient Greek law? Even when I did not dare to write about it here I have been aware of the very useful Nomoi portal for this vast subject, hosted by the Simon Fraser University. The Digital Classicist Wiki gives you a fair idea of digital projects concerning Classical Antiquity. For the latest news you can often reckon on the marvellous Ancient World Online blog (AWOL) which figured here prominently in a 2016 post about journals for ancient legal history. In a post about inscriptions I did mention projects on the rim of the Roman empire, but in fact all countries around the Mediterranean and in the Near East form the territories of Classical Antiquity. I did not hesitate to mention papyri in that post, too.

In the project in the middle of this contribution a lot of themes come together: Greek law, inscriptions, papyri and Ptolemaic Egypt. The very title of the project Synallagma. Greek Contracts in Context goes with an explicit reference by its creator, Uri Yiftach (Tel Aviv University), to its earlier title, “Greek law in Roman times”, a phrase which indeed suggested Greek law is only a footnote or at its best a lesser relative of Roman law. Synallagma means originally mutual exchange. In the user guide and introduction Yiftach explains the working of this database with some 6,000 legal documents. With twelve fields you are able to filter for your specific search question. In the advanced search mode you can add search fields at will. In the overview of results the locations of documents, mainly in Egypt, take pride of place. Among the strengths of the Synallagma database are not only the references to the main overviews of inscriptions and papyri, but they will even directly link to them. You will see for example an embedded screen with information from Papyri.info, an aggregator of the main papyrological databases. These databases bring you to images, too.

A very useful function is the clauses section which distinguishes the elements of a contract. In the start screen you can select from twelve contract categories. You can set the presentation of search results in various orders. Thus it is easy to ascertain for example the first occurrence of a cheirographon in 247 BCE, and its latest in the eighth century CE, or to filter for contracts with women as one of the parties involved, in 1220 items. The drop down menu for gender includes also a couple, groups and forms of incorporation. Acts of sale dominate with 2820 items, followed by petitions and applications. some 2,500 items, nearly 1,600 lease contracts, and nearly 1,400 loans and deposits. The sum is higher than the total of 6,000 items, and one can readily assume the petitions concern all kind of contracts. There are 420 laws and decrees.

From Greek law to the Roman empire

P. Rain. Cent. 166 – image Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna

I was intrigued by the testamentary dispositions (235 items) in the Synallagma database. When I saw two of them stem from Ravenna in the sixth century CE I could not help being greatly interested from the perspective of Roman law. Alas the two papyri, P.Ital.-01-00004-and 5, dated 552-575, and P.Ital. 01-00006 from 575 did not show up correctly at first in Synallagma. At Papyri.info only P.Ital. 1.4-5 (ChLA 17.653) is present. P.Ital I refers to the edition by Jan-Olof Tjäder, Die nichtliterarischen lateinischen Papyri Italiens aus der Zeit 445-700 (Lund 1955). In the Trismegistos database (TM) P. Ital. 1-6 (ChLA 2.714) is recorded as a Latin text in Greek script. ChLA stands for Chartae Latinae Antiquiores, and you can search for items in ChLA using an online database.

Synallagma notes two other documents from Ravenna. The first is P. Rain. Cent. 166 / ChLA 45.1346 = P. Ital I 10 = TM 35870, a Latin act of sale from the sixth or seventh century CE, digitized at Vienna. Another act of sale from 151 CE (SB 6 304, TM 18822) in a papyrus held at Giessen which turns out to be a wax tablet, written in Latin with passages in Greek script. You can read about it online in a study by Hans Georg Gundel, Antiker Kaufvertrag auf einer Wachstafel aus Ravenna (Giessen 1960). Papyri.info has a checklist for the most used editions and their abbreviations. I have on purpose expanded some of these references to papyri, but in fact I left much more out as you can check yourself.

Recently appeared a volume of essays with the title Ravenna: its role in earlier medieval change and exchange (London 2016), edited by Judith Herrin and Jinty Nelson, now put online in open access by the School of Advanced Study in London. Simon Corcoran contributed an article on ‘Roman law in Ravenna’ (pp. 163-198) and looked also at the evidence of papyri. Trismegistos makes it very clear that many hundred papyri stem from Ravenna, but only 70 are dated later than 400 CE.

One of the few quibbles I have with Synallagma is the absence of a possibility to save your results. No doubt such features are present for those who register with the project, and do not stay content with the guest access I used. You can frown on me for leaving Synallagma so quickly for the lures of papyrological databases, and eventually even for Roman law, but we should admit Synallagma inspires you to check such resources and link them with your own favorite subjects.

As for linking places with objects I cannot help adding here a link to Peripleo, the latest jewel in the crown of the Pelagios initiative. It offers nothing less than an interactive map where you can click on modern and ancient locations to find objects from Classical Antiquity associated with them. Miraculously there is no direct entry for Ravenna, but in one of its supporting resources, the Pleiades gazetteer, it is present, clearly a case of oversight. You might feel sometimes almost sick from manoeuvring from one site to another, but did scholars not use to work with piles of books in front of them to find their way? By patiently combining and comparing information, and as often as possible looking at projects or studies with a very particular search angle such as Synallagma, you can build slowly and cautiously but also consistently. Hopefully such resources will surprise you also every now and then with insights that help you decisively.