Lost and Found: Collective Memory and Historical Imagination in Renaissance Jurisprudence

• In Event: Trading Freedom for Liberty: Redefining Rights, Sovereignty, and Identity in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This paper explores how the language of ancient customs and natural rights was used, extended, and in some cases even invented, in order to legitimate authority as well as to limit it, as part and parcel of early modern state- and empire-state formation in the sixteenth century. As such it will explore ways in which the “Western Legal Tradition” was effectively invented, though presented as recovered, by jurists (humanist and scholastic) such as Ulrich Zasius, Francisco de Vitoria, Jean Bodin, and Thomas More in their attempts to solve local problems by invoking universal norms.

Author

• Susan Longfield Karr, University of Cincinnati