A Forgotten Renaissance: The Interplay between Jurisprudence and Humanism (14th-16th c.) and Its Cultural Legacy

forthcoming

From the 14th to the 16th centuries, European jurists and humanists worked in the same social milieu, competed for the same political roles, and often shared the same education. Yet, the scholarly consensus portrays these professional groups as indifferent or hostile to one another. HumanLaw challenges this view by revealing a network of mutual influence between jurists and humanists so extensive and significant that its continued oversight is striking. Integrating philosophical, historical, philological, legal, and digital approaches, HumanLaw will illuminate the uncharted interplay between medieval jurisprudence and Renaissance humanism in terms of social interactions, shared references, and mutual intellectual influence. The project will unearth and analyze a vast and neglected manuscript corpus of non-legal works by Renaissance jurists, including philosophical and political reflections, grammatical observations, orations, and poetry. Furthermore, we will use quantitative methods of text and network analysis to trace humanist influences in Renaissance legal literature and to explore the juridical involvement of Renaissance humanists. By examining the humanists’ writings, we will reveal unacknowledged references to coeval legal debates that informed key humanist notions such as virtue, knowledge, politics, and truth. In reconsidering these notions, we will also shed light on their influence on subsequent developments in Western culture, including the debate over universal rights, the birth of modern science, the development of critical methods of inquiry, and the ethico-political theories of the Enlightenment. By challenging traditional narratives, the project will catalyze a paradigm shift in our understanding of the Renaissance and its continuing impact on Western thought. This will open new avenues of research in intellectual, cultural, and legal history; philosophy; literary studies; and Renaissance philology.