Gaspar de Jovellanos y Friedrich von Savigny: el recurso a la filología y su aportación a la disciplina

Abstract

This article explores the similarities between Gaspar de Jovellanos» and Friedrich Carl von Savigny’s approaches to medieval legal documents. Both deal with the difficulties to comprehend medieval legal texts which constitute a hermeneutical approach applying a historical method in which philology is an auxiliary discipline. Both scholars, however, have a secondary interest in this, which is to reconstruct the medieval historic context and thus the culture in which the legal texts were produced. While Jovellanos is interested from the perspective of a judge in the historical context to be able to understand and apply the legislation, Savigny uses the historical method to be able to analyse and explain the differences in the legal system after the Code Napoleon was introduced into German states. It argues that Jovellanos» is in line with European philosophical thinking, namely the German, and that his distinct philological approaches put him at the crossroads between hermeneutics, philology and linguistics.