Lawyers and Early Modern Culture

Abstract

ALTHOUGH EUROPEAN HISTORIANS have increasingly recognized the impact of large-scale change or significant events on human culture, they have paid little attention to the importance of the less dramatic aspects of social experience for shaping the attitudes of men. The result has been, for most of us, a schism between social and intellectual history that has impoverished both. As Frederic C. Lane has reminded us, the routine tasks of daily life are likely to impress those engaged in them with a profound sense of what the world and especially men are like and to produce patterns of expectation and systems of value-dimensions of culture in its larger meaning.' Eventually these impressions are likely to find explicit formulation in philosophy, science, theology, and literature and the other arts-in culture in a narrower sense. But since the work by which men support their needs tends, particularly in the modern world, to be highly differentiated, it is difficult to treat the relation of work to culture in general terms. To get at this relationship, the historian must examine the experience of particular occupational groups that have held a position of strategic importance both in movements central to their social universe and in the articulation of its vision of the human condition. The rise and development of groups of this kind, especially where they have not previously been prominent, gives the historian an opportunity, unique in its concreteness, to study the sources and the nature of social change. In addition such groups may be especially useful for identifying the sources in social experience of fundamental shifts in attitudes and values. Scientists and technologists invite this kind of study in our own time. So, for early modern Europe, do lawyers. In view of the attention recently directed to social history, it is remark-