The name is absent

Lawyers and Church in Renaissance 153
tion of legal names initially attracted to the Reformation is
even more striking. In France it includes the great legist
Dumoulin, the great humanist student of the law Budé, and
among later figures Connan, Hotman, and Bodin. In Ger-
many and Switzerland Zasius and Amerbach received the
first manifestoes of the Reformation as the dawn of a new
age. Nor must it be forgotten that the legal training of Calvin
in a school of interpretation founded by Alciato was an im-
portant part of his education, and one that shaped his method
and style.

In spite of this widespread and indeed natural connection
between the humanist lawyers and the Reformation, how-
ever, it is also among this same group of lawyers that we find
the earliest expressions of disillusionment with the doctrines
of the Reform. There is no better illustration of this than
a letter of Boniface Amerbach written to Alciato from Basel
in August of 1524. Amerbach, a student and subsequently
professor of the civil law, had returned to Basel to find the
Reformation in full course. He wrote to his friend deploring
the extremes to which the followers of the new doctrines
were resorting. He reports that Erasmus who was formerly
regarded as the very prince of theologians is now considered
to be absolutely ignorant of sacred theology, that all disci-
plines are under attack, and that even the Latin language
would be abolished by the most extreme in the belief that
all that it was necessary for a Christian man to know was a
little Greek and Hebrew. This is Amerbach’s reaction to the
extremes of the new Christian humanism. With these inter-
preters language had become more than an aid to under-
standing, it had become the only way in which a text could
be explained. Amerbach continues: “And although among
all the disciplines jurisprudence has the least evil repute be-

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