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Civil Science in the Renaissance: Jurisprudence Italian Style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Donald R. Kelley
Donald R. Kelley
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
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Extract

In the history of Renaissance thought and learning jurisprudence seems to be a missing term. Not that the scholarship of civil, canon and customary law is itself lacking, or lagging, but it has not been sufficiently integrated with that of other fields, and even in the modern history of the Renaissance ‘encyclopedia’ it does not hold high priority. In some modern views of the studium, in fact, law seems to stand not only below the trivium and quadrivium but even, since it lacks utility as well as liberality, below the mechanical arts. Petrarch and other humanists would no doubt be pleased at this turnabout; and others may find justice (in a historian's if not a lawyer's sense) at the fall of the profession of law from academic grace. For present purposes, however, we must try to lay aside the prejudice which many of us may feel toward lawyers, modern counterparts of the pedants derided by Petrarch and the ‘mean and mercenary’ pettifoggers denounced by Cicero. It is not the purpose here to plead the cause of Renaissance jurists; but it may be possible, by attending to some of their less celebrated (or lamented) achievements, to do some justice to their place in the history of learning.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , December 1979 , pp. 777 - 794
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

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