Early Modern English Humanism and Antiquarianism: The Prosopographical Method and Reflections on Historico-Legal Tradition

Abstract

This article aims to investigate some of the fundamental historiographical and methodological issues raised by the emergence of legal history as a branch of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It does so by contextualising the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries and by deploying a prosopographical method to evaluate its connections with embryonic genres of historical writing and with the legal profession. It concludes by emphasising the need to distinguish the legal and historical concerns which underpinned the Society in the early modern period, and argues that the emergence of the Society constituted a significant stage in the formation of legal history as a discipline with certain distinctive methodological attributes.