What significance did the Lex Regia De Imperio Vespasiani bear for the Dutch philosophers in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Did it simply define a question of law and its
ancient use? Was it responsible for the definition of a scholarly exercise in
literary-rhetorical regulae? New Studies on Lex Regia explores these questions as the dispute
on a non-literary source (the Lex Regia) is exemplary for the way in which philological
research came together with interpretations of the Roman law and the political conclusions
drawn from them. Situated between philosophy and philology this book attempts to rehabilitate
a debate on the fides historica in Cartesianism and post-Cartesian Pyrrhonism. It focuses on
the role that modern historiography on Rome plays in the construction of the politico-cultural
model between republicanism and absolutism in the works of the Dutch thinkers Gronovius Ulrik
Huber Perizonius Noodt and Barbeyrac.
