Introduction

Natural law is an essential element of the conceptual vocabulary of modern science and philosophy; the term is also prominent, if perhaps less central, in modern jurisprudence. In both early modern jurisprudence and natural philosophy, natural laws became ever more closely associated with causes of both human conduct and physical effects. These transformations profoundly modified earlier understandings of natural law, with implications for conceptions of order and epistemology. The term law implied a lawgiver, who commanded or imposed edicts upon subjects, Deus legislator. Sixteenth-century natural philosophers had formulated ideas of hierarchy without recourse to such legal metaphors, as in the case of the Paduan philosopher Jacopo Zabarella's distinction between universal natures and particular natures. Genuinely empirical arguments, proceeding from the large and growing corpus of ethnographic reports available to early modern Europeans as a result of the voyages of discovery, appear to have been rare in natural law jurisprudence.