Lawyers and Church in Renaissance 139
ture, would be of the greatest practical use for their very pro-
fessions.”
This indictment by Petrarch was repeated and enlarged by
his successors in the next and the following generations. One
of the most characteristic preoccupations of the humanists
was their interest in history. Their sense of historical time
was largely based upon their researches in philology and their
discovery that words could have different meanings in dif-
ferent epochs. Hence was born the notion of anachronism,
and anachronism could be used as a weapon of historical
criticism. This destroyed the basis of the Bartolist position,
and the humanist invective against tire lawyers became more
intense and followed very much the pattern of the indict-
ment already delivered against the scholastic philosophers.
We find Maffeo Vegio, for example, in the second quarter of
the fifteenth century condemning the lawyers for their lack
of history and even blaming the compilers of Justinian’s
Digest for having proceeded in an Unhistorical manner.
The most considerable attack on the Bartolists was, how-
ever, delivered by Lorenzo Valla in 1433. In that year the
young humanist scholar, still in his twenties, had gone to the
University of Pavia to take the chair of rhetoric. Lilce the
other Italian universities of this period, Pavia was divided in
its organization into the faculty of art and the faculty of law,
the latter of which included both civil and canon law. Each
faculty had its own Rector and its own organization and
there had developed a considerable rivalry between the two
schools. One day Valla came upon a group of law professors
lavishing uncritical praise on the Bartolists. The remark was
made that one small treatise of Bartolus, specifically the
De Insigniis et Armis, was better than all the works of Cicero.
Valla made an incredulous reply, and then immediately