Lawyers and Church in Renaissance 151
heir Boniface Amerhach of Basel and from him eventually
found its way to the Netherlands where it was published in
the seventeenth century and immediately put on the Index
by the Roman Church. The deviations from orthodoxy of
Alciato were thus known to but few in his Hfetime and the
most respected lawyer of his generation was able officially
to dissociate himself from protestantism.
It is obviously impossible to suggest conclusive generaliza-
tions from the few examples I have been able to consider this
morning. It is nevertheless a significant fact that two lawyers
as eminent and influential as Decio and Alciato should have
attacked such fundamental parts of the ecclesiastical struc-
ture as the position of the papacy and the institution of
monasticism. The consilium of Decio was public while the
treatise of Alciato was privately circulated but we cannot
help wondering whether the thousands of students who
heard these men lecture imbibed similar views or at least
hints of antagonism toward the contemporary church. In any
age gifted lecturers give to their students far more than a
mass of professional information and in the view of the world
presented by the great lawyers of the Renaissance we should
not be surprised to find a considerable strain of anticlerical-
ism, manifest in many different ways. It appears not only
in formal treatises on points of institutions and dogma such
as the ones we have considered this morning but also in
hundreds of Consilia and records of particular cases. Lawyers
who entertained doubts on the validity of monasticism were
apt to deal severely with monasteries in cases involving prop-
erty rights. Even lawyers who taught courses in canon law
as Decio did could whittle away the rights of clerics when
these were invoked in particlular cases. The many tomes of
consilia, case books, commentaries and treatises on special