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  • The History of Byzantine and Eastern Canon Law to 1500 ed. by Wilfred Hartmann and Kenneth Pennington
  • David Wagschal
The History of Byzantine and Eastern Canon Law to 1500, edited by Wilfred Hartmann and Kenneth Pennington. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Pp. xvi-356.

This volume, the fourth to appear in the series History of Medieval Canon Law, represents a major landmark in the English-language study of Byzantine and eastern (or "oriental") church law. Over twenty years in the making, it brings to English-language audiences a wealth of German and Greek scholarship known until now only among a rarefied circle of specialists.

Susan Wessel opens the work with a chapter on the pre-Nicene development of eastern church law. This topic is one of the few in the volume that has been extensively treated in western European literature, and Wessel will be forgiven for not breaking much new ground. She nonetheless produces an elegant account of the principal institutional, theoretical and literary developments of this period. Her sensitivity to different models of authority and strategies of legitimization—a sociological sensitivity generally lacking in the rest of the work—is particularly welcome.

Wessel's contribution is the only chapter in the volume that attempts to present a synthetic account of its topic. The rest of the work, divided into four chapters, is instead a source survey of a type very familiar to continental audiences: each chapter proceeds source by source providing detailed information for each text on content, provenance, significance, editions and scholarly bibliography.

Heinz Ohme, one of Germany's leading scholars on eastern Orthodox church law, has contributed the first of these four chapters, "Sources of Greek Canon Law to the Quinisext Council (691/2). Here Ohme treats in great detail and with his characteristically discriminating judgment all of the principal material sources (councils and fathers) of the Greek canonical [End Page 666] collections up to the late 7th C. The result is a tremendously useful, and often original, exposition that will undoubtedly become a standard point of reference.

The next two chapters treat the formal sources of Byzantine canon from the 4th C to the 15th C, as well as post-7th C material sources. Here Spyridon Troianos, widely regarded as the doyen of Byzantine legal studies in Greece, makes available for the first time in any western European language much of the wealth of information contained in his magisterial Peges tou Byzantinou Dikaiou (Athens, 3rd edn. 2011). With a bibliography ranging into Russian, Serbian, and Greek scholarship of the last century and a half, and with treatment of many texts only very poorly known in the west, these chapters will also now unquestionably become the standard English-language reference source for the texts covered. Troianos' intimate familiarity with the texts and manuscripts is frequently evident, and many of his discussions (e.g. on the Canonical Synopsis, or the novels of Leo VI) represent the cutting edge of scholarship.

Hubert Kauf hold's final chapter on "eastern" canon law evinces a similar level of creative synthesis. Assembling a huge array of hard-to-find and poorly known literature on the Melkite, West Syrian, Marionite, Coptic, East Syrian, Armenian, Georgian and Ethiopic traditions, Kauf hold, a specialist in Syrian legal texts, has produced what is probably the most comprehensive and accurate presentation of the legal sources of the oriental orthodox churches in print. Like Ohme and Troianos, his presentation moves beyond the mere rehearsing of the results of the secondary literature, and includes many original suggestions and judicious assessments of traditional problems.

A few weaknesses may be noted. Despite the generally very comprehensive bibliography, the works of a few important Anglophone authors (e.g. Hamilton Hess, Clarence Gallagher) have a surprisingly marginal presence for a work aimed at an English-language audience. Reference to a major English translation of monastic typika (ed. John Thomas and Angela Hero) seems to have been overlooked. Careful readers will also note the occasional typo and a certain level of inconsistency in patterns of transliteration—but considering that the bibliography ranges across at least eight languages and no less than three Greek accentuation...

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