ABSTRACT

Like many legal humanists, Hotman was far more indebted to the scholastic postglossators of the later Middle Ages than he liked to let on. Indeed that unacknowledged debt provided the central conceit of his historical reconstruction of the original, early medieval Francogallican constitution. Hotman, the leading French Roman lawyer of his generation, affected from the very start to believe that his work was an exercise in antiquarian scholarship. Jurisprudents in French universities rapidly came to constitute the vanguard in this humanist school. Francogallia achieved notoriety as soon as it was published. It was translated into French within a year. Its arguments were quickly popularised in less forbidding guises, in the vernacular. Middle Age(s) was coined by those scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who would later be categorised as humanists. They saw themselves, and are still seen, as central to the cultural movement known as the Renaissance.