The Law and the Law Books: Two Examples from the Translated Juridical Literature on the South of Slavs in the 14th Century

Mariyana Tsibranska-Kostova

Institutе for Bulgarian Language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Abstract

The article focuses on the following two texts: About the Civil Laws from the Introduction to the Mathew Blastares’s Syntagma, and the textual unity From the Law Books about the Kinship and the Forbidden Marriages in the so called Nomocanon Cotelerii, or the Slavonic Pseudo-Zonaras. They both are translated from Greek, and spread on the South of Slavs with 14th century documented witnesses. The texts are presented with a set in the original and in a modern Bulgarian translation. The analyzis of the linguistic and textological peculiarities aims at revealing what view on the secular laws exists in medieval society; what is the axiological nature of the concept of law; what theoretical and concrete identification issues poses the study of regulations from Byzantine civil law in Slavonic legal collections.

Keywords: Medieval civil law, Mathew Blastares’s Syntagma, Nomocanon Cotelerii (Pseudo-Zonaras nomocanon)