‘Strictum ius’: early modern legalism in continental civil law - Ian Maclean
Location:
In Person:
Neil MacCormick Room
Edinburgh Law School
ld College
EH8 9YL
Virtual: Zoom
Date/time
Tue 27 September 2022
13:00-14:00
The Edinburgh Centre for Legal History presents
‘Strictum ius’: early modern legalism in continental civil law
Professor Ian Maclean, All Souls College, University of Oxford, and University of St Andrews
About the seminar:
In this paper, I set out to give an account of legalism as a feature of legal theory and practice in the early modern period. Various current meanings of the term ‘legalism’ are evoked, before the concepts of ‘strictum ius’ and ‘rigor iuris’ in both medieval and early modern civil law are examined, as well as the challenges posed to strict or literal interpretation and practice by antinomianism, equity (‘aequitas’), morality (‘honestas’), bona fides, the public good (‘utilitas’, ‘bonitas’) and custom (‘consuetudo’). I shall place this investigation in the context of some keenly disputed areas in intellectual and legal history: how does the ‘early modern’ period (say, 1460-1700) relate to the Middle Ages? Can one now talk about a ‘long Middle Ages’ that extends from the eleventh to the end of the seventeenth century? In other words, did a Renaissance in legal studies happen in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? And is it right to distinguish radically between Civil Law, Canon Law, Customary Law, and the Common Law in terms of jurisprudence, and were all these areas of law immune from the influence of adjacent disciplines such as theology? And finally, did legal humanism actually make any substantial difference to the interpretation and practice of civil law (you will remember that those who identified themselves at the time as legal humanists had no doubts that it did), or not?
About the speaker:
Professor Ian Maclean, Emeritus Professor of Renaissance Studies, University of Oxford; Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews
The general area of my research is the organization and transmission of knowledge in early modern Europe. This involves the history of interpretation in the higher faculties (law, medicine, theology) and the economics and modalities of the trade in learned books in the period. I have completed a third volume on this last topic which is due to appear in 2020 entitled 'Episodes in the life of the early modern learned book'. I have also completed a study of the reception of Hippocrates in late seventeenth-century Europe, which is due to appear in a volume co-edited by Dmitri Levitin and myself entitled 'Classical reception in early modern Europe: comparative perspectives'. My present project is a study of the last writings of Girolamo Cardano, which will include a partial edition of his final work, the 'De prudentia eximia'.
Full Bio on the All Souls College, University of Oxford website
This event is free and open to all, no registration necessary.
Venue details to be announced in due course.
Image credit: Photo by Rui Alves on Unsplash