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2. Custom, History, and Law
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. “Ne transgrediaris terminos antiquos quos posuerunt patres tui.” Cf. Proverbs : and :: “Remove not the old landmark; and enter not into the fields of the fatherless” (King James Version). This appeared on the title pages of Pierre Pithou, Les libertez de l’eglise Gallicane (Paris: M. Patisson, ); and of the collection Traictez des droits et libertez de l’Eglise gallicane (Paris: Pierre Chevalier, ) and all subsequent editions. . William Bouwsma, “Gallicanism and the Nature of Christendom,” in Anthony Molho and John A.Tedeschi, eds., Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Florence, Italy: G. C. Sansoni, ), –, p. . . Les remonstrances de Messire Jacques de la Guesle (Paris: Pierre Chevalier, ), . chapter 2 Custom, History, and Law G of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a favorite motto, drawn from the Vulgate version of Proverbs :. Readers glancing at the title pages of the various collections of tracts and documents published by the arch-Gallican Pierre Pithou and his successors were admonished “pass not the bounds that your ancestors have placed.”1 “The verse,” according to William Bouwsma, “was more than a conservative slogan. It was an invitation to historical scholarship .”2 If so, though, it was an invitation to historical scholarship of a specifically legal kind. Jurists understood the word termini, “bounds,” literally , as markers dividing fields; one of them translated the word as haies, “hedges.”3 The boundaries of ecclesiastical administration were thus to be treated like a disputed piece of real estate, which is a bit odd considering what we have just seen about the history of Gallican thought. For centuries, after all, Gallicans had idealized a Church stripped of wealth, worldly cares, 6! and hence corruption. More specifically, since the fourteenth century they had held as an indisputable maxim that the Church could have no jurisdiction over real property in France.4 The significance of this tag is therefor less than obvious. The key to this riddle is to be found in the political theories of humanistically trained Gallicans. This becomes clearer if one examines other contexts in which similar concepts were cited.Take, for instance, a learned dinner party held in Rome in at which the essayist Michel de Montaigne found himself defending Jacques Amyot (not present at the table) against charges that his translation of Plutarch’s Lives had travestied the original author ’s meaning. One piece of evidence Amyot’s detractors put forward was that, in a passage describing how the Athenian legislator Solon had removed the stones marking fields as mortgaged, Amyot made the great statesman boast of having “freed Attica, and having removed the boundaries that separated heritages.”5 If Solon had done what Amyot made him do, though, he would have been exactly the opposite of a great statesman, destroying the very foundations of the society he was in fact restoring.The implication was that Amyot understood neither Greek nor that political wisdom of which Plutarch was a sage. Markers dividing fields stood for the traditional underpinnings of the social order in general, and in particular for that part of it which law and political prudence ought to preserve. These markers also stood for the ineluctable realities of a finite political and historical order, the same realities that du Bellay had evoked in his Roman poems.Thus, in , when France had narrowly escaped destruction in the frenzied climax of theWars of Religion, a prominent magistrate opened a special court session in Lyons with this deliberate invocation of the Antiquitez : Change and alteration of kingdoms, provinces, and empires is an ordinary thing, based on the natural law of created things, for God has established for them Custom, History, and Law . See Olivier Martin, L’Assemblée de Vincennes de et ses conséquences (Paris: Alphonse Picard , ), –. . Michel de Montaigne, “Journal de voyage en Italie,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: N.R.F./Gallimard, ), –: “en la vie de Solon, environ sur le milieu, où il dict que Solon se vantoit d’avoir affranchi l’Attique, et d’avoir osté les bornes qui faisoint les séparations des héritages. Il a failli, car ce mot grec signifie certenes marques qui se mettoint sur les terres qui estoint engagées et obligées, afin que les acheteurs fussent avertis de ceste hypotheque. Ce qu’il a substitué des limites n’a point de sens accomodable, car se seroit faire les terres non libre, mais commune.” Among the other guests at this dinner was the French expatriate...
