THE IMPACT OF HUMANISM

By the end of the fifteenth century the ius coppune developed by the Bartolists was becoming more and more influential throughout Europe, as new universities were founded and more jurists were trained in the traditional learning.

In the fifteenth century Italian scholars had become aware of the riches of classical antiquity in all its aspects. They seized on anything that threw light on ancient society and its thought and avidly studied texts which had lain dormant for centuries. The Roman law texts had been known and studied since the twelfth century, but its scholars had not been very interested in what they had to say about classical antiq­uity. A scholar who approached the texts of the Corpus iuris with the critical attitudes of the new humanism was bound to be disappointed, if he sought elucidation in the work of the glossators and Commentators. A humanist scholar was full of questions which they had not asked. He wanted to know about the authority of the text, how accurate it was, what were the fact-situations that lay behind the rulings of the classical jurists, but such matters had been almost ignored by previous exponents. So the humanist scholars found themselves wading through turgid dis­cussions, written in barbarous medieval Latin, that threw little light on what they wanted to know.

The humanists at Pavia in northern Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century were shocked by the form in which they found the texts of the classical jurists, excerpted in the Digest. In their eyes, Tribonian, Justinian's minister in charge of the compilation, had not only excerp­ted the texts but in the process had mutilated them and introduced lin­guistic barbarisms. In his Elegnntine linguae Lnlinne. Lorenzo Valla praised the classical jurists and condemned not only Tribonian but also all the medieval commentators from Accursius to Bartolus for their bad Latin. Their insensitivity to correct language was proof, in Valla's view, that they could not be competent lawyers. Valla demonstrated that the so- called Donation of Constantine, a document by which the emperor was supposed to have granted temporal power to the Pope, and which had been accepted as genuine by most of the medieval exponents of civil and canon law, was a fake. His proof was partly based on the language of the Donation and partly on the anachronism that Constantine was supposed to have given the Bishop of Rome jurisdiction over the patriarch of Constantinople, who did not exist at the time. Thus humanism engen­dered a new critical attitude to the sources of law.

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