In the context of published Venetian documentary sources, mainly devoted to public, notarial, and monastic funds, the Synodicon of Lorenzo Giustiniani, bishop of Castello (Venice), starts to fill the existing gap regarding the sources on ecclesiastical subjects. In fact, this publication is part of a more extensive program involving a number of works containing regulations edited by the patriarchs of Venice that is presently being conducted by Pascal Vuillemin. As is indicated by the title of this book, its purpose is to consider the relationship between reform and ecclesiastical law at the end of the Middle Ages. The bibliography and the notes are very rich and attest to extensive research in the archives and libraries in order to present the published text in its historical and documentary context, at both a local and an international level. This is achieved thanks to a comparative analysis, which demonstrates the full integration of the text in the more general Italian and European movement of ecclesiastical reform through the “compilation of statutes.”

The first part is an extensive introduction in three sections designed, first, to define the difficult context of the diocese of Castello (Venice), which oversaw the drafting of the compilation; second, to trace its elaborate process, thanks to the research and identification of all the sources explicitly cited in the compilation itself; and, finally, to understand the formal organization and content of the latter. In the context of the rivalry that opposed the patriarch of Grado to the bishop of Castello, the compilation of the Giustiniani statutes became a battle plan that was a prelude to his victory some years later thanks to his election as the first patriarch of Venice in 1451. The two most important preexisting and conflicting ecclesiastical seats were now merged into one.

The second part presents the only preserved manuscript of the text, which is kept at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, and the already existing modern editions (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), which are imperfect and erroneous, according to the author, thus leading him to propose this new critical edition, which constitutes the third part of the book. At variance with previous Venetian historiography on ecclesiastical matters that generally emphasizes the figure of Lorenzo Giustiniani as first patriarch of Venice, Vuillemin prefers to focus on one of the texts by Giustiniani that he considers fundamental: his compilation of statutes promulgated in Latin in 1438 and named Synodicon by an eighteenth-century scholar who edited its first publication. Vuillemin attributes a high value to the compilations of statutes that he strives to define, despite their being hardly distinguished from regular statutes by medieval sources. According to Vuillemin, they are a source hitherto unjustly neglected by historians. He attaches a particular importance to them as a symptom and an effect, allowing the understanding of the use of law as a weapon of reform in the history of the church.

The introduction to the critical edition is very clear and well developed, but somewhat conventional. He organizes it in three parts according to the French standard that allows for a clear and easy read. Given its nature, this text is aimed at an audience of scholars specialized in religious history. Despite his confidence and his enthusiasm, Vuillemin tries in contradictory ways to convince us of the capital importance of compilations of statutes, as he himself states in his conclusion that the Giustiniani compilation is neither groundbreaking nor original, but simply lasted longer (in use) than the others, a good 140 years (97).