James Morton’s book fills a gap in the historiographical landscape concerning the Greekness of Byzantine and post-Byzantine southern Italy, introducing readers to the under-researched topic of the Western reception of Byzantine religious laws.
The production and the social role of nomocanons (a collection of ecclesiastical and civil laws relating to ecclesiastical matters) of Italo-Greek origin is the common thread which leads to an understanding of Byzantine ecclesiastical legislation within the juridical pluralism established in those regions that had been returned under imperial government after the ninth century AD, that is, at the very time when Byzantine canon laws were taking their final shape. Preserved in various European libraries, the 36 codices examined here (ten of which contain Patristic texts), attributed to southern Italy on palaeographic and codicological bases, testify to the Byzantine cultural longue durée in the Italic West. Morton analyses the manuscripts’ production according to the hermeneutic paradigms of legal anthropology, with an explicit reference to the models of iurisgenesis theorized by Robert Crove (‘The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Foreword: Nomos and Narrative’, Harvard Law Review 97 (1983), 4–68), and to his distinction between an imperial mode and a paideutic mode in the process of the sociocultural elaboration of the law. Confirming a trend in civil legal texts, the forms and contexts of the Italo-Greek nomocanons change along with the political and cultural conditions: where their normative function ceases, their preservation is ensured for practical purposes and from then on for paideutical purposes.
The volume consists of three historical and interpretative parts, subdivided into ten chapters plus a conclusion and three appendices; it includes 16 tables and 16 figures, six maps and a chronological table.
In the first part, ‘Sources and Context’, having defined the origin, structure and function of the Byzantine nomocanons, as well as their material aspect, Morton introduces the English-speaking reader to the political-religious history of Byzantine and post-Byzantine Italy, pointing out the specific evolution of Italo-Greek Christianity until the Angevin conquest. He also provides a review of the available sources. In the second part, ‘Byzantine Canon Law in the Norman Kingdom’, the collections of the canon law of the Eastern Church are examined by relating the production of this period and that of the previous, characterized by a certain mismatch with respect to the coeval Constantinopolitan production. The religious policy of the Norman kings, under the banner of a relative autonomy from Rome and the substantial indifference of the papacy towards both the clergy and Italo-Greek monasticism, facilitated what Morton considers a sort of ‘legal fiction’ (119) by which the Italo-Greek subjects acted as if the institutional reference were still the imperial church of Constantinople and not Rome. The tenacity of the bond with the Byzantine tradition thus explains, for example, the traces of an anti-Latin controversy in the collections of the 12th century (unleavened bread) and the 13th century (priests’ marriage, fasting). By contrast, having demonstrated that the production and acquisition of nomocanons is specific to the great Norman monastic foundations, the author shows how the possession of a collection of Eastern canon law granted the Italo-Greek monastic institutions both the references for proper internal administration and the legal arguments for the protection of rights, exemptions and the many endowments they enjoyed. In short, the Norman nomocanons are both a management tool and a source of legal authority, which can be invoked in case of dispute; owning a nomocanon is a sign of autonomy as well as of the continuity of possible relations with Constantinople.
The political-religious evolution of medieval southern Italy from the beginning of the 13th century as reflected in the manuscript tradition of the nomocanons is addressed in the third and final part, ‘From Legal to Cultural Authority’. The author looks at the papacy of Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council as the starting point for the loss of autonomy of the Greek clergy and monasticism that the Hohenstaufen dynasty was still trying to maintain. Among the many references found in the Calabrian area, Salento and Sicily that illustrate this evolution, at least one can be noted here: the contrast that emerged between 1218 and 1223 between the archimandrite of San Salvatore, a royal foundation exempted from episcopal authority since 1130, and the bishop of Messina. To defend his prerogatives and protected by the privilege of foundation, the archimandrite appealed to Frederick II, heir of Roger I as a secular guarantor authority. The papal letters testify to an unresolved, and therefore reiterated, controversy that the current examination of the marginal notes not only confirms but also illustrates more closely. Drafted by a 13th-century hand, they reveal how the attempt to reach a solution favourable to the archimandritate was the concern of someone who, for this purpose, cites and annotates relevant passages of canon legislation. This means that even when recourse to the law appears vain because it is obsolete, the antiquity and the authority of the source provide legitimacy to conduct: the imperial mode gives way to the paideutical mode.
The three appendices constitute perhaps the most important part of the entire volume. They consist of a review of the ‘Italian’ nomocanons, with displays of stemmatic filiation or groupings, built on the basis of palaeographic attributions. Although there are no significant innovations with respect to the attributions already proposed by Italian scholars who have dealt with Italo-Greek manuscripts, it is necessary to underline the usefulness of these appendices. They have the merit of taking stock of both the manuscripts of uncertain attribution and those that are certainly not Italo-Greek.
The conclusion of the book, accessible for a public not necessarily expert in the cultural history of Byzantine and post-Byzantine southern Italy, can be summed up as an example of the juridical pluralism that characterised the central centuries of the Middle Ages in southern Italy, Italo-Greek manuscripts of the nomocanons, unlike other ‘products’ of Byzantine culture, show no sign of hybridism, no Latin influence, no trace of multiculturalism. Observing Byzantine canon law, even though it was obsolete, was a sign of genuine belonging to Orthodox Greekness, and it represented a form of resistance to the increasing Latinisation of Greek-speaking communities.
