Nature, self, and history in the works of Guillaume Bude, Andrea Alciati, and Ulrich Zasius: A study of the role of legal humanism in Western natural law

This dissertation contributes to contemporary scholarship on natural law and natural rights theory by demonstrating that Renaissance humanism---rather than being irrelevant to or an incongruity in the history of natural law and natural rights theory---represents a continuity without which the history remains incomplete. Specifically, through the study of the beginnings of legal humanism in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this dissertation demonstrates that legal humanism not only challenged and transformed certain aspects of the scholastic traditions, but also influenced seventeenth-century natural law and natural rights theories. To do so, this dissertation examines and analyzes lectures, orations, letters, and Emblems by Guillaume Bude (1468-1540), Andrea Alciati (1492-1550), and Ulrich Zasius, (1461-1535) wherein they discuss fundamental categories of Roman law, such as justice, right, good and equity.;This study shows that the historical and philological methods introduced into the study of law by legal humanists contributed to a shift toward an increasingly secular understanding of natural law and natural rights, which in turn helped lay the theoretical foundations for the historical fiction of the 'state of nature' so characteristic of seventeenth-century theories. Because this project focuses on a period of major change in western history---not unlike the present---in which thinkers attempted to retrace and reexamine the rights tradition that they inherited, it will contribute to contemporary attempts to reconsider and re-evaluate the history of human rights theory in the west.;The broader implications of this project concern current thinking about human rights and its relation to the natural law and natural rights traditions in the West. It suggests that as human rights scholars continue to grapple with a central problem within the scholarship---namely, accounting for the transition from natural rights to human rights in the early modern period---that it would be beneficial to expand the field of inquiry to include an investigation of how customary rights (ius gentium) became rearticulated as natural rights (ius) in the face of---and as a vehicle for---fundamental changes in political, legal, and social life in the early modern period.