Not new but novel. Notes on the historiography of Byzantine law

Abstract

It is some time since the late Alexander Kazhdan undertook a private crusade under the title ‘Do we need a new history of Byzantine law?’ Of course his answer was in the affirmative. In one sense one would be unable to disagree; in another sense, however, one ought to answer that the history Kazhdan was asking for would not so much be new; rather it would be a novelty, as it had not been written before.