historiography

Written by Richard T. Vann

Last Updated8-1-2014

Legal history

France was the earliest beneficiary of the rise of Italian humanistic scholarship, but it differed from Italy in ways that facilitated fruitful extension of the new learning. The Protestant stimulus to historiography was much stronger in France, and there was also no inquisition or Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of Prohibited Books”) to suppress free inquiry. Whereas Italian humanists tended to regard the Middle Ages as an embarrassing interlude between the glories of ancient Rome and their own time, France had been the intellectual centre of Europe during that period. Furthermore, any serious treatment of medieval history required sorting out Germanic elements from Roman ones, a problem that the French were better able to undertake.

Guillaume Budé and François Hotman

Throughout the Middle Ages the Code of Justinian, or Corpus Juris Civilis (“Body of Civil Law”), the four-volume codification of Roman law compiled under the patronage of the Byzantine emperor Justinian (483–565), was regarded as the quintessence of human law, applicable in virtually every situation. Parts of it were contradictory or barely intelligible, but commentators regarded these difficulties as the result of their own hermeneutic ineptitude. In the 15th century, however, humanists (among them ... (200 of 41,374 words)