Jacques Cujas and the European Circulation of Legal Knowledge: Humanism, Exile, and the Republic of Letters (Sixteenth–Early Seventeenth Century)

This article examines Jacques Cujas (1522–1590) not merely as a leading Renaissance jurist, but as a central node in the European circulation of learned practices connecting law, philology, theology, and political thought. Drawing on a biographical and prosopographical corpus centered on Cujas and several of his students or intellectual heirs—François Dujon (Franciscus Junius), Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, Jean Savaron, and Joseph Justus Scaliger—it analyzes the diffusion of humanist legal method from French universities to the Dutch Republic. Particular attention is paid to the role of confessional exile, academic mobility, and institutions such as the University of Leiden in transforming legal humanism into a durable scholarly and political culture.