John Calvin, the Jurisconsults and the Ius Civile

Extract

The first brief writing of Calvin to appear in print was the epistle to the French jurisconsult François de Connan, which preceded the short treatise Antapologia issued by Calvin’s fellow student Nicholas Duchemin against the Italian jurisconsult Alciati. In this epistle, headed Ioannes Calvinus Francisco Connano iuris studiosissimo, Calvin wrote ‘. . .our friend Duchemin who, as you know, is a man most careful in his studies, of perspicacious mind, and what is of the first importance, of the most penetrating judgement; and who is abundantly learned in the best literature has now become engaged upon, and has already been engaged upon, legal studies. . .’: every word here could have been applied to himself. The occasion of this dedication, written in March 1531, when Calvin was a young law student of twenty-two at Orléans, was the eagerness of Duchemin and Calvin to support their admired master, Pierre de l’Estoile, against the devious method of attack by Alciati at Bourges, who had published a criticism, under the name of a pupil or under a pseudonym, of l’Estoile’s interpretation of a point of civil law wherein he had shown that Alciati on this point had borrowed from the greatest of French classical scholars, Guillaume Budé, without acknowledgment.