Since the Corpus almost wholly lacks any explanation of general principles, a certain amount of creative interpretation was necessary. The originality of a medieval juristic proposal may often be judged by the irrelevance of the texts cited to support it. This greatly incensed the Renaissance humanists, who complained at length about the medieval jurists’ barbaric accretions on the original Roman law (“nothing but filth and villainy,” says Rabelais),21 but from the point of view of developing concepts, as opposed to preserving the purity of a more primitive era, one’s sympathies may well lie
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