1st Edition

The Writing of History and the Study of Law

By Donald R. Kelley Copyright 1997
    360 Pages
    by Routledge

    This second volume of essays by Professor Kelley takes the study of history as its starting point, then extends explorations into adjacent fields of legal, political, and social thought to confront some of the larger questions of the modern human sciences. The first group of papers examine the historiography of the Protestant Reformation and then of the Romantic and Victorian periods; the last section focuses on the legal tradition and its interpretation in relation to social and cultural, as well as historical thought, in the period from the Renaissance to the French Revolution. Throughout, the author’s interest is to analyse how people at different times have viewed their past - and reconstructed and utilised it in the service of their present concerns.

    Contents: Introduction; Humanism and history; Tacitus Noster: The Germania in the Renaissance and Reformation; Johann Sleidan and the origins of history as a profession; History as a calling: the case of La Popelinière; Martyrs, myths and the massacre: the background of St. Bartholomew; History and the encylcopedia; Ancient verses on new ideas: legal tradition and the French historical school; Mythistory in the Age of Ranke; Robert Flint, historian of ideas; The science of anthropology: an essay on the Very Old Marx; Second nature: the idea of custom in European law, society and culture; Civil science in the Renaissance: the problem of interpretation; Jurisconsultus perfectus: the lawyer as Renaissance man; Men of law and the French Revolution; Index.
    '..each of these essays contains material and insights that remain compelling and important.' Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. XXIX, No. 3