The quantity of surviving legislative material from late medieval Italy is astounding and unmanageable. In the eighteenth century, Muratori spoke of it as a forest covering the whole of Italy. Estimates of the number of volumes of statutes run to thousands. For many cities, there are two or more printed editions: one redaction printed in the late fifteenth century, and an earlier redaction edited by nineteenth- or twentieth-century scholars. Verona, Ferrara, Modena and Lucca are typical examples: fifteenth-century redactions of their statutes were printed in 1475, 1476, 1487 and 1490, respectively; and earlier versions (1288, 1308, 1327) in the late nineteenth or twentieth centuries. But between those redactions, other versions of the statutes either survive, unpublished, in the archives (as in Lucca), or do not survive at all (as in Ferrara). Bologna has seven unpublished redactions of its statutes from years between 1355 and 1454. The process by which a redaction is chosen for publication has been criticised as highly arbitrary and anarchic: the later twentieth century saw an unco-ordinated flood of new editions, some of which led to the publication of minor texts while major texts were left languishing in the archives. Moreover, the statutes, as Andrea Zorzi has recently pointed out, represent only one part of the ‘normative fabric’, for alongside them was the ongoing legislation of decrees and ordinances (bandi, decreta, provvigioni, riformaggioni). These were, in Philip Jones's phrase, ‘incessant and innumerable’.