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Bourges to Geneva: Methodological Links Between Legal Humanists and Calvinist Reformers

1989; University of California; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1557-0290

Charles H. Parker,

Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

Bourges lo Geneva: Methodological Links Between Legal Humanists and Calvinist Reformers As humanist thought swept across northern Europe from Italy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it brought seeds of change for the­ ology, legal scholarship, and political philosophy. In France humanists in­ fluenced religion and law in similar ways: they advocated reform of these contemporary institutions from an appeal to history. Even after the 1534 Placards Affair separated humanism and Protestantism into divergent movements, both groups continued to promote change in their respective spheres. The most effective polemical weapon employed by legal human­ ists and Calvinist theologians was new historical perspectives fashioned in order to challenge the authenticity of traditional institutions and to legiti­ mize their own programs of reform. My research on legal humanists at the University of Bourges and Calvinist reformers in Geneva explores the specific methodological links between these two distinctive groups. Such particular connections suggest a general intellectual affinity that tran­ scended short-term political and confessional goals, a common ground that points to the rise of a burgeoning methodology in early modern intellec­ tual history. In the sixteenth century legal humanists endeavored to return to the text of the Corpus Juris Civilis and to incorporate a historically-inclined the­ oretical perspective into legal scholarship.' Since the thirteenth century, legal scholars had depended on glosses of the Corpus compiled by Accur- sius and his students at the University of Bologna. These glossators ap­ plied Roman law across six centuries to contemporary judicial issues. As legal scholarship and education evolved over 200 more years, post-glossa- torial jurists became increasingly removed from the Corpus itself as they based their studies and curricula on these commentaries rather than on the text of the Roman law. With their textual emphasis, legal humanists placed