Despite humanist attacks, the elaborate medieval developments in Continental law remained generally intact. In terms of quantity, if not quality, the high point of academic legal thought on probability and presumptions is reached in the three massive volumes of Mascardi’s On Proofs, of 1584, and the two of Menochio’s On Presumptions, Conjectures, Signs, and Indications, of 1587. Though the production of large Latin tomes on evidence did not cease after that time,16 the two were always taken to be the definitive treatments.
