Renaissance Historicism Reconsidered

Abstract

The history of historiography is concerned not only with historical writing and historical scholarship but also historical consciousness, the changing ways of viewing the past and its relationship to the present. Modern historical consciousness, or has been widely regarded as originating in the preromantic and romantic movements of late eighteenth-century Germany, but some recent historians have maintained that it originated from scholarly developments in late sixteenth-century France. This revisionist view, however, confuses modern historical consciousness with modern historical scholarship. It correctly attributes a growing awareness of historical and cultural relativity in the sixteenth century to developments in historical scholarship, but it incorrectly identifies this sense of relativity with historicism, thus obscuring the true nature of historical consciousness in the French Renaissance. This revisionist view is based largely on the work of John Pocock, Julian Franklin, Donald Kelley, and George Huppert.1 Despite certain differences in approach and emphasis, each of these authors shows how the study of Roman law in sixteenth-century France contributed to an awareness of historical and cultural relativity. French legal scholarship followed the mos gallicus, as opposed to the mos italicus; in the study of Justinian's Corpus juris. The latter school adhered to the Bartolist tradition, establishing universal law by a logical analysis of the text, whereas the former school emphasized the need for a philological analysis of the text to establish its true meaning before applying it to an understanding of current legal problems. The application of humanist philological techniques to the study of the Corpus juris inevitably drew French legal scholars into the historical consideration of Roman law, as they found themselves reconstructing the social, political, and institutional history of Rome in order to clarify the meaning of the text. As a result of this study, Roman law stood revealed not as universal law but as the law of a past society,