Matching the modern citations of the Novels with the Vulgate edition is a challenge. The novels were known in the West in three basic forms. The earliest, the Epitome Juliani, is principally of interest to students of the earlier Middle Ages. The Bolognese glossators, beginning probably in the early twelfth century, began to recover the novels in a more complete form. These they arranged in nine collections (Collationes), consisting of a number of novels, to each of which they assigned titles. (They also inserted pieces of them in the Code where they thought that novel superseded the constitution in the Code; identifying those pieces will be done when the data for the Code is finalized.) After the Collationes had become a teaching book and its contents fixed, more novels were discovered. These, along with the ones in the Collationes were arranged in a collection known as the Authentica, which was numbered consecutively. The modern edition has approximately thirty more novels than does the Authentica, 168 in all, all of which were known at the time our edition of the Vulgate was published, and versions of all of which are included within it. It is, however, arranged according to the scheme of the collationes, with the additional novels being added in appropriate places, principally in the ninth collatio. Godefroy, or a previous editor, also provided titles for those novels that did not have a title in the collationes or the Authentica. As work proceeds on matching the citations in the modern edition with those in our Vulgate copy and on transcribing the titles that do not correspond any in the medieval editions of the Vulgate, we have provided below a list of all the novels in the modern edition, its corresponding number, if one exists, in the Authentica, and its citation and title in the medieval Collationes, once more if one exists. We have not yet provided the titles from the Authentica, because, by and large, these were not used for citation purposes. An asterisk preceding the modern citation indicates that Justinian issued a Latin version of the novel, which has survived. All the rest were translated from the Greek at one time or another. The source of this data is the helpful article that Stephan Kuttner published in Seminar almost seventy years ago. There may be scansion errors, which we would appreciate having called to our attention.

The only modern edition of this work is Karl Lehmann’s Consuetudines feudorum, which does not seem to be avaiable online. We’ll get to it, but it may take a while.