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 accessible for subscribers 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 seemed 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 translations in European languages of Justinian’s Digest, 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 there is 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 databases can be used with a filter for Law. Luckily at Pinakes the three volumes of the repertory for Byzantine legal manuscripts have 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 surviving more than one thousand years and covering in some periods large areas of Eastern Europe and Asia 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.

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 languages 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 other Roman laws, 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.

A postscript

In my post ‘Entering the field of Byzantine law’ (January 2023) I was thankful for Bela Pókol who had asked me again about the existence of translations in modern European languages of key texts for Roman law. The overview of such translations at my website could clearly be extended.

Medieval laws in translation

Languages can act as formidable barriers to our understanding of both past and present. Even if you happen to have a talent for foreign languages translations can help you in many ways to gain insight into the messages and form of a source. In medieval Europe many legal sources were written or only accessible in Latin. However, a number of medieval legal texts have been translated into the vernacular. In this post I want to look at a number of medieval translations of such sources and at two modern translation projects. Recent news about these projects offers me an occasion to write about this subject.

Medieval translators at work

In the Middle Ages translating the works of Aristoteles from Greek – or Arabic – into Latin formed probably the largest translation project of a millennium. The volumes with the scholarly edition of the Aristoteles Latinus project are still being published. For many scientific disciplines medieval translators took the trouble of translating important sources. In the field of law, too, one can point to translations. The most massive project, the Basilica, is not only a translation but also an adaptation of Justinian’s Institutes, his Digest, Codex and the Novellae. For some parts of the Justinian codification older Greek translations exist which the translators around 900 used in Byzance. A team at the University of Groningen led by H.J. Scheltema produced a modern critical edition of the text and the scholia, the accompanying glosses [Basilicorum libri LX (17 vol., Groningen 1953-1988)].

A very interesting example of a translated medieval legal text is Lo Codi, a legal commentary from the twelfth century originally written in Occitan, a language spoken in Southern France and Catalonia. Lo Codi has been translated in French, Castilian, Latin and Franco-Provencal. I wanted to check information about this text at the homepage of Johannes Kabatek at the Universität Tübingen. Since his move to Zürich this page has been removed, but luckily he has put them on his private website. At this webpage you can compare different manuscripts and versions. An article about Lo Codi by Kabatek from 2000 is also available online (PDF). Kabatek does show Lo Codi is an independent adaptation of the Summa Trecensis, and not just a translation.

The first large-scale project I want to introduce in this post is The Medieval Nordic Legal Dictionary, a project led by the University of Aberdeen. Not only a dictionary will be the fruit of this project, but also translations of Scandinavian laws. Two volumes with translated laws have already appeared. A few years ago I wrote here about medieval Scandinavian laws, and it is surely helpful to be able to use these translations alongside the original texts. The page for laws of this project provides you with a quick overview of the main laws. the current editions and the planned or already published translations. The bibliography of the dictionary project shows that luckily for some texts translations appeared in the twentieth century, however, in a number of cases into current Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish or Swedish.

Some medieval legal texts have been translated in the sixteenth century. This month I saw an announcement for a lecture in Paris on April 6, 2016 by Patrick Arabeyre (École nationale des Chartes, Paris) on ‘Deux exemples de traduction vers le latin dans le domaine juridique : la traduction d’ordonnances royales par Étienne Aufréri (1513) et la traduction des Coutumes d’Orléans par Jean Pyrrhus d’Angleberme (1517)’ as a part of a conference on La traduction en vernaculaire entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance. The first subject of his lecture were royal ordinances edited by Étienne Aufréri in 1513, and he looked also at the translation by D’Angleberme of the Coutumes d’Orléans (1517). A second lecture by Frédéric Duval, also attached to the ENC, concerned the versions of Lo Codi. In April 2015 Duval presented a paper about French translations of the Corpus Iuris Civilis.

Nowadays the French Biblissima portal is a fine gateway to several projects concerning the production and transmission of manuscripts, and using the English interface it is very much accessible. One of the online databases at the École nationale des Chartes is called Miroir des classiques, “Mirror of the Classics”, a project in which Duval participates. Unfortunately this database does not yet contain any notice about translated legal texts, but eventually they will be included. How can one trace more medieval translations? For Ancien Français, one of the phases of medieval French, there just happens to be a resource that can help you. The bibliography of the Dictionnaire Étymologique de l’Ancien Français (DEAF) does lead you to a number of translations, many of them still only existing in manuscripts. The section C of this bibliography shows for example two thirteenth-century translations of the Code de Justinien. The entry at CodiFr mentions Lo Codi and states flatly this is a translation of the Codex Justinianus, a notice clearly in need of some updating. Under the letter I you will find both a complete translation of the Institutiones Iustiniani and an abridged version. Five manuscripts exist with a French translation of the Digestae. The Summa Codicis of Azo, too, exists in a French version, the Somme Acé. By the way, you can find a number of online dictionaries and textual corpora at the website of the Dictionnaire de Moyen Français. For the field of medieval canon law one has to single out the medieval French translation of the Decretum Gratiani. This translation has been edited by Leena Lofstedt, Gratiani Decretum. La traduction en ancien français du Décret de Gratien (5 vol., Helsinki, 1992-2001). I have not taken a complete tour of the sources of the DEAF, but it is certainly rewarding to look for yourself, and not only for matters concerning France. Anglo-Norman texts appear here, too.

Searching in manuscript catalogues will no doubt yield further results. A search in the digital catalogue for archives and manuscripts of the British Library brought me to ms. Royal 20 D IX, a late thirteenth-century French translation of the Authenticum and the Tres Libri, the books 10-12 of the Codex Justinianus. The database Manuscripta Iuridica at Frankfurt am Main contains for example for the French translation of the Institutes – usefully put together as Institutiones Justiniani, versio Gallica – references to thirteen manuscripts. The manuscript in London, too, has not escaped the attention of Gero Dolezalek and Hans van de Wouw, the creators of the Verzeichnis der Handschriften zum römischen Recht bis 1600 (4 vol., Frankfurt am Main 1972) used for the database, nor did they miss the French version of the Digestum Vetus, and the Infortiatum. For Azo you will find not only the translation of his Summa Codicis, but also a translation of his summa on the Digesta.

Twelve volumes and an addendum

Five years ago the last of the twelve volumes of the modern Dutch translation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis appeared. I wrote here a post about the presentation of the final volume in 2011, and in that post I looked also at other complete translations of the Corpus Iuris Civilis. On Friday April 15, 2016 yet another volume was presented at a symposium in Utrecht. Jop Spruit, the indefatigable founder of the project, translated with Jeroen Chorus also the Libri Feudorum, a twelfth-century text from Lombardy concerning customary law dealing with fiefs. Kees Bezemer wrote the introduction to this translation with facing Latin text. In my view the translators wisely choose to follow the version of the Libri Feudorum as found within the Corpus Iuris Civilis. One of the arguments to include this work on customary law into the curriculum of the medieval law schools was the presence of glosses by Accursius. The modern critical edition gives both the oldest and the most used version (Vulgata) [Karl Lehmann (ed.), Das Langobardische Lehnrecht, (Handschriften, Textentwicklung, ältester Text und Vulgattext, nebst den capitula extraordinaria (Göttingen 1896; online in the Internet Archive)]. However, more versions came into existence. At the symposium in Utrecht Jeroen Chorus gave a talk about possession in the Libri Feudorum. Dirk Heirbaut compared the feudal law in the Libri Feudorum, the Leenrecht van Vlaanderen and the Lehnrecht of the Sachsenspiegel. Rik Opsommer discussed the use of the Libri Feudorum in the practice of Flemish feudal law, and Kees Bezemer looked at the role of feudal law in Early Modern Europe with a focus on a case in seventeenth-century Germany which became the subject of a disputation defended at Frankfurt an der Oder. The best point of depart to start exploring Early Modern German juridical disputations is the digital library of the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main.

The team of Dutch translators hesitated about the right number of the latest volume in the series of translated texts of Roman law. Twelve is such a beautiful number suggesting completeness! They finally opted for 12 Addendum. The set of twelve volumes can still be ordered from Amsterdam University Press.

Until now I have looked almost in vain for other translations of the Libri Feudorum. The translation by Lorenz Weidmann, Die Lehensrecht verdeutscht (…) was printed at least seven times between 1530 and 1541. The German bibliographical project VD 16 does not only make such statements possible, but it leads you also to the digital version of the first edition Augsburg 1530 (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek). Robert Feenstra wrote about it in his article ‘Kaiserliche Lehnrechte. Die Libri feudorum in deutscher Fassung nach Alvarotus und andere Inkunabeldrucke zum Lehnrecht. Mit Beiträgen über Johannes de Vanckel und die casus summarii des Baldus’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 63 (1995) 337-354. There is also an online version of a translation by Jodocus Pflanzmann printed in an incunabula edition, Das buch der lehenrecht (Augsburg 1493; GW 7776). The Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) has a useful overview of editions and partial editions before 1501 of the Corpus Iuris Civilis. GW 7654 is a French translation printed at Paris around 1486 of Justinian’s Institutes, interestingly made in verses. The identification of the probable author, Richard d’Annebaut, is also given in the bibliography of the DEAF with references to the unique manuscript source, London, British Library, ms. Harley 4777.

Discussing the Libri Feudorum is entering a territory where three decades ago things might have seemed straightforward. Things have changed very much since Peter Weimar’s article ‘Die Handschriften der Libri feudorum und seine Glossen’, Rivista Internazionale di Diritto Comune 1 (1990) 31-98, reprinted in his volume of essays Zur Renaissance der Rechtswissenschaft im Mittelalter (Goldbach 1997) 171-238, and the study of Gérard Giordanengo, Le droit féodal dans les pays de droit écrit. L’exemple de la Provence et du Dauphiné XIIe – début XIVe siècle (Rome 1988). I must refer you here to online bibliographies such as the one provided by the Regesta Imperii at Mainz to see how much has been written recently about the approach of medieval lawyers to feudal law.

Of course it is possible to use modern translations of medieval legal texts, but in this post I wanted to investigate medieval translations. For searching modern translation one can benefit from the Online Medieval Sources Bibliography which even offers filters for translations containing also the original texts, translations in English, French or other languages. It might be helpful to end here with briefly noting the publication of the revised edition of Fred Blume’s translation of Justinian’s Code edited by Bruce Frier [The Codex of Justinian (3 vol., Cambridge, etc., 2016)]. The German translation project for the Corpus Iuris Civilis reached in 2012 its fifth volume with the books 28 to 34 of the Digest, edited by Rolf Knütel [Corpus Iuris Civilis, Band 5, Digesten 28-34 (Heidelberg 2012)]. Let’s hope the leaders and translators of such projects will and can benefit from the recent Dutch experience in completing a book project with nearly nine thousand pages.

A postscript

Frédéric Duval will present in June 2016 a paper about the late-medieval translations into French of parts of the Corpus Iuris Civilis at a two-day conference in Tours, Les traductions médiévales à la Renaissance et les auto-traductions (Tours, June 8-9, 2016).

In 2017 the Miroir des classiques project of Duval contains very detailed information also for medieval French translations of legal texts.

Twelve volumes of Roman law in Dutch translation

Ad fontes, “to the sources”, is one of the characteristics of the historical sciences and philology in the Western world. Historians and other scholars prefer for many reasons no longer to rely on second-hand information, on editions which do not show clearly the intervention of its editors, and one should use preferably the original sources and not a translation. Sometimes this view gained power as a core of historical doctrine, almost literally a dogma. Dealing with sources from the closest possible distance became part and parcel of the historian’s trade.

Sometimes scholars devote themselves not only to the use of sources at first hand or in critical editions, but to the translation of sources. In particular texts in Latin and Greek from Classical Antiquity have been translated into Dutch during the last decades. In my view it is quite a feat to have so much translations in a language which is spoken by only 23 million people, mainly in my country and Belgium. Patrick De Rynck and Andries Welkenhuysen published a bibliography of Dutch translation of classical texts, De Oudheid in het Nederlands (…) (Baarn 1992), online at the Digital Library for Dutch Literature. They published a supplement in 1997. For some authors a team of scholars works on the Dutch translation of all major works, for example a number of works by Augustine of Hippo has been translated recently under the aegis of the Augustijns Instituut in Eindhoven.

The Corpus Iuris Civilis in Dutch

On November 15, 2011, the twelfth and last volume of the Dutch translation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis will be presented in Utrecht to Mr. Ivo Opstelten, the Dutch minister of Security and Justice. A translation of the Institutiones Iustiniani, the first volume of the series, was published in 1993. The twelfth volume of the series Corpus Iuris Civilis. Tekst en vertaling contains the Novellae 115-168. During the eighteen years it took the team of scholars led by Jop Spruit, Robert Feenstra and the late Karel Bongenaar (1935-1999) the membership of the team changed remarkably little. Instead of Feenstra ‘s name which figures on the covers of the Institutes and the Digest Jeroen Chorus and Luuk de Ligt strenghtened the editorial team for the Justinian Code and the Novels. However, the project had to change from publisher. Initially Sdu Uitgeverij in The Hague and the Walburg Pers in Zutphen published jointly the series. In 2005 the publishing house of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW) took the series over, and the last volumes are published jointly by the KNAW and Amsterdam University Press. Bibliographers and cataloguers can show their skills in describing the set and the volumes correctly according to the varying national standards.

Publishing twelve bilingual volumes with nearly 8,000 pages is quite a feat, but the qualities and stamina of the translators are just as remarkable. For the translation of the Digestae, the Codex Iustinianus and the Novellae two scholars took care of each of the fifty libri. Their results were discussed with one of the editors-in-chief, and then a second version was prepared. The final result was presented to the editorial steering committee. At some points other scholars helped the teams to clarify difficulties in the text which defy even the most courageous and skilled legal historian. The chief editors looked at it again when all libri of a projected volume were ready, with special care to the quality of the rendering in Dutch and the consistency of the translation, not just for the correct interpretation of juridical terms, and sent the ultimate version off to the publishers.

The auctor intellectualis and indefatigable leader of the project, Jop Spruit, has a record of keen interest in many aspects of the study of Roman law, and in particular translations have received his attention. He published a concise bibliography of Roman law, Bibliografie Romeins recht. Wegwijzer tot de bronnen, hulpmiddelen en literatuur [Bibliography of Roman law. Guide to the sources, research tools and literature] (Zutphen 1988). Translations are present in a chapter of Spruit’s guide. With Karel Bongenaar he presented four volumes of translations of pre-Iustinian law sources, Het erfdeel van de klassieke Romeinse juristen. Verzameling van prae-iustiniaanse juridische geschriften met vertaling in het Nederlands (4 vol., Zutphen 1982-1987), thus making accessible in Dutch a large number of the sources in collections such as the Fontes Iuris Romani anteiustiniani (3 vol., Florence 1940-1943; reprint 1964-1968) and adding fragments and texts found since the midst of the twentieth century. When starting the project for the Corpus Iuris Civilis Spruit and Bongenaar had already a lot of experience with translating the Latin of Roman lawyers.

Other modern translations of the Corpus Iuris Civilis

Not only in Dutch modern translations of the constituent parts of the Corpus Iuris Civilis exist, but asking for a complete translation yields only a few results. The German project Corpus Iuris Civilis. Text und Übersetzung led by Okko Behrends, Rolf Knütel and others started in 1990 with a translation of the Institutiones Iustiniani of which a third edition appeared in 2007. Between 1995 and 2005 appeared three volumes of a translation of the Digestae. The libri 1-10, 11-20, and 21-27 are available. All volumes are bilingual with the Latin text and facing translation. In comparison with the Dutch enterprise progress might seem slow. It is only fair to notice that Okko Behrends has been involved also in the edition and French translation of other sources from Roman antiquity in the series Corpus agrimensorum Romanorum, but it is equally true that anyone involved in translating for both projects has done or is doing this in the midst of other activities.

In the second volume of the Dutch project (Digesten 1-10 (1993)) Jop Spruit and Robert Feenstra discuss briefly a number of translation of Justinian’s Digest (pp. xxxi-xxxiii). Some of the translations of the Digest mentioned are a part of translations of the whole Corpus Iuris Civilis, and these editions date mainly already from the nineteenth century. A French translation was produced by Henri Hulot and others, Corpus Iuris Cvilis. Corps de droit civil romain en latin et en français (…) (17 vol., Metz-Paris 1803-1811; reprint, 7 vol., Aalen 1979). The set can be consulted partially online at the Portail Numérique de l’Histoire du Droit, only the translation of the Digest, books 40 to 50, and the Novels have to be added. The German translation Das Corpus Iuris in’s Deutsche übersetzt vom einem Vereine Rechtsgelehrter was edited by Carl Eduard Otto, Bruno Schilling and Carl Friedrich Ferdinand Sintenis (7 vol., Leizpig 1830-1833; 2nd ed. Leipzig 1831-1839; reprint Aalen 1984-1985), available online at the Hathi Trust Digital Library. In Italian you can even find two nineteenth-century translations, first the Corpo del diritto civile (…), Francesco Foramiti (ed.) (4 vol., Venice 1836-1844), and later by Giovanni Vignali (ed.), Corpo del diritto corredato delle note (…) (10 vol., Naples 1856-1862).

In English Samuel P. Scott published Corpus Iuris Civilis. The Civil Law (…) (17 vol., Cincinnati 1932; reprints New York 1973 and Union, N.J., 2001). This translation is available online, even though the reliability for scholarly use of this translation has been subject to doubt. Scott also included translations of the Twelve Tables and other texts. For the Digest exists a more recent English translation published by Alan Watson, The Digest of Justinian (4 vol., Phildelphia 1985; reprint 2008). The translation has been reprinted in 1997 in two volumes, without the Latin text. Spruit duly notes the translation in Spanish of the Digest by a team with among other A. d’Ors and F. Fernandez-Tejero (El Digesto de Justiniano (3 vol., Pamplona 1968-1975). Marc van der Poel, a reknown scholar of Neolatin, notes on his online bibliography for the history of Latin a Russian translation of the Digest by Leonid L. Kofanov, Digesty Justiniana (11 parts in 8 vol., Moscow 2005-2008).

In the first volume of the new Dutch translation of the Codex Iustinianus – volume VII of the series appeared in 2005 – Spruit and Feenstra mention in the introduction other translations of the Codex (p. xli-xliv). Pascal Alexandre Tissot had already translated the Codex as Les douze livres du Code de l’empereur Justinien (4 vol., Metz 1807-1810; reprint Aalen 1979) – available online (Hathi Trust) – before his translation was also included in the series edited by Henri Hulot and others. The Codex, the Digest and the Novellae have been translated into Spanish by Ildefonso L. García del Corral, Cuerpo del derecho romano a doble texto (…) (6 vol., Barcelona 1889-1898; reprint Valladolid 1988). This translation is available online at the Biblioteca Juridica Virtual (UNAM, Mexico City) and most easily accessible through the Edictum website of Norberto Darío Rinaldi (Universidad de Buenos Aires).

Spruit and Feenstra note that translating Justinian’s Code is made more difficult by the way many constitutions have been taken over in shortened form from the Codex Theodosianus. They point explicitly to the translation by Clyde Pharr and others, The Theodosian code and novels, and the Sirmondian constitutions (Princeton 1952; reprint Union, N.J., 2007) as a fine tool for translating the Codex Iustinianus. In the Dutch project the Authenticae have also been translated and put together at the end of the Code.

I checked the Index Translationum of UNESCO, which one can try to use as a shortcut to get a more or less reliable view of extant translations worldwide from the last two or three decades, but the Dutch translation is sadly missing among the search results. It is not the first time that the Index Translationum appeared to be rather defective, but nevertheless it can be helpful to widen the horizon of a search. The search results for individual parts did however contain the selection of texts from the Codex Justinianus translated by Gottfried Härtel and Frank-Michael Kaufmann (Leipzig 1991) on the basis of the nineteenth-century German translation. It is worth reading the introduction and the epilogue to this Nachübersetzung (re-translation) dated “Leipzig Dezember 1988”. Härtel translated with Liselot Huchthausen also the Institutions of Gaius and the Laws of the Twelve Tables in a volume with selected legal texts (Römisches Recht in einem Band (first edition Berlin-Weimar 1983; 4th ed., 1991)). Although I have admittedly not done a complete and exhaustive search it seems plausible to conclude for now there is no sign of any other current project for a complete translation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis apart from the projects led by Spruit and Behrends, both cum suis.

The English translation prepared over the years by Justice Fred H. Blume of both the Justinian Code and his Novels has been painstakingly edited and made ready for online publication by Timothy Kearley (University of Wyoming). On the website in Wyoming the appearance of a new English translation of the Code by a team led by Bruce Frier, and a translation of the Novels by David Miller and Peter Saaris is announced for 2011. It is said to be published by Cambridge University Press, but I could not yet find an announcement on its website. For both translations Blume’s work is consulted. If you bring together a translation of Institutes, for example the one by Birks and McLeod (1987), the translation of the Digest by Alan Watson and his collaborators, and these two translations using Blume’s project you will have access to the Corpus Iuris Civilis in a recent English translation.

Finis coronat opus

The names of the translators participating in the project for the Dutch translation read like an overview of almost every contemporary Dutch and Belgian scholar in the field of Roman law. Spruit and Feenstra got assistance not only from Romanists, but also from specialists in the field of Roman history and church history. They acknowledge the fruitful contacts with the German translators. It is perhaps envious to single out some scholars, but in my opinion the Novellae would very likely not have been translated into Dutch from the original Greek if Jan Lokin, Nicolaas van der Wal and Bernard Stolte had not cooperated, and certainly not as quickly and thorough.

In this month’s Rechtshistorische Courant, the monthly bulletin on legal history in Belgium and the Netherlands published by the legal historians at Ghent University, the Dutch team gets praise for its perseverance. The project is compared to a kind of Tour de France, with all kinds of routes. I will not try to outdo their eulogy, but I am sure the end crowns the work!

A postcript

A new French translation of the Digest has arrived, Les cinquante livres du Digeste, Dominique Gaurier (ed.) (3 vol., Paris 2017), with also Lenels palingesia of the Edictum perpetuum.

The updated edition of Blume’s translation was published later than expected: Bruce Frier, The Codex of Justinian. A New Annotated Translation, with Parallel Latin and Greek Text (3 vol., Cambridge. etc., 2016).