A Companion to Byzantine Law: From the Foundation of Constantinople (330) until the End of the Macedonian Dynasty (1056) (Brill's Companions to the Byzantine World, 15)

Book info: A Companion to Byzantine Law: From the Foundation of Constantinople (330) until the End of the Macedonian Dynasty (1056) (Brill's Companions to the Byzantine World, 15) (Hardcover, 416 pages) – Brill, 2025. Language: English.

The so-called Byzantine Empire, which existed for more than a thousand years with Constantinople as its capital, demonstrates the birth of a new world with the wedding of Western and Eastern traditions. This study of Byzantine legal texts, mainly from the 6th to the 11th centuries, illustrates this clearly, following the evolution of Roman law into Byzantine law. By outlining and analysing the influence of various historical, social, and religious factors on this progression, the present handbook not only presents a condensed picture of the evolution of law in the area beyond the Adriatic Sea, but also indirectly sheds light on Byzantine society more broadly. Contributors are: Kalliopi (Kelly) Bourdara, Wolfram Brandes, Zachary Chitwood, Giuseppe Falcone, Andreas Gkoutzioukostas, Fausto Goria, Vasileios-Alexandros Kollias, Alexander Liarmacopulus, Valerio Massimo Minale, Eleftheria Papagianni, Kalliopi Papakonstantinou, Daphne Penna, Peter Sarris, Dieter Simon, Marios Th. Tantalos, Spyros Troianos†, and Thomas van Bochove. Editorial Reviews Review "...This book is, therefore, a very welcome and timely contribution that will be useful to anyone who wishes to catch up with the state of research in the field. The structure and writing style make it accessible to established scholars, postgraduate students, and advanced undergraduates [...]
...if one approaches this volume mainly as a companion to research in Byzantine civil law sources, it is an outstanding accomplishment. The editors and authors are to be commended on the successful completion of what must have been an arduous task. The product is a highly informative volume that finally makes research in Byzantine legal history accessible in English to a non-specialist audience for the first time. It will doubtless become the standard reference work on the subject for many years to come." - James Morton, Department of History, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, in: Journal of Medieval History 52/1 (2026), pp. 147-148 [DOI: ]

"...One great strength of the volume is in its ability to speak clearly to the novice while remaining relevant even to the specialist. Contributors are consistently successful in presenting their material in ways that do not assume any prior knowledge, making the entire volume suitable for the classroom or other beginners. [...] Paired with Daphne Penna and Roos Meijering’s A Sourcebook on Byzantine Law: Illustrating Byzantine Law through the Sources (Brill, 2022), students and scholars alike have a veritable introductory course to Byzantine law at their fingertips. The field is certainly more accessible than ever, both to specialists and non-specialists alike. Spyros Troianos, to whom the volume is dedicated, passed away in January 2024. The present volume is a fitting tribute to Troianos’s monumental, lifelong work of demystifying Byzantine law and making it more available to others." - Nathan Leidholm, Bilkent University, in: The Medieval Review (2026), 26.03.15, published online: About the Author Eleftheria Papagianni is Professor Emerita of Legal History at the National and Kapodistrian University. She participated in an international research project at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History to republish the Byzantine legal sources of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and served as the project's director from 2008 to 2011. She is the author of numerous books and articles, mainly on Byzantine civil law.
Daphne Penna is Assistant Professor of Legal History at the University of Groningen and Associate Professor of Roman Law at KU Leuven. She is the author of The Byzantine Imperial Acts to Venice, Pisa and Genoa, 10th-12th Centuries: A Comparative Legal Study (The Hague, 2012) and co-author of A Sourcebook on Byzantine Law: Illustrating Byzantine Law through the Sources (Leiden, 2022). She has published extensively on Roman and Byzantine law, and especially on their influence on the European legal tradition.