Legal Science and Legal Ramism

Abstract The chapter investigates the intellectual context in which Jean Bodin’s legal science, outlined in the Iuris Universi Distributio, originally developed. The chapter explores the methodological conflict between the Bartolist legal science of the medieval universities and the humanist jurisprudence championed in France, especially in Bourges. The author argues that Bodin, trained at Toulouse, belonged neither to the Bartolist nor to the humanist schools, as generations of scholarship maintained. Instead, Bodin’s legal science reveals a pedagogical style associated with Pierre Ramus. This “Legal Ramism” provoked a critical reimagination of the entire body of classical Roman law into a new rational system.