As Xavier Prévost rightly observes at the beginning of his book, there is a strange paradox between the great fame that Jacques Cujas has enjoyed throughout the centuries and the relative scarcity of studies on the man and his work. Driven by youthful energy and the urgent desire to fill that gap, Prévost read the 13,000 columns of the Fabrot edition of Cujas's Opera omnia (1658) in addition to investigating archives in Toulouse, Bourges, and Paris with the aim of offering a comprehensive view of Cujas's life, academic career, and scholarly work. Even after this meticulous research, many elements in Cujas's biography remain uncertain—for example, we do not know exactly when he graduated as a law student—but the author has done about everything possible to advance our knowledge about Cujas. Prévost has also corrected false assumptions along the way; for example, rejecting Friedrich Carl von Savigny's dating of Cujas's marriage to Madeleine Du Roure (72, footnote 270).

Clearly, Prévost's Jacques Cujas (1522-1590): Jurisconsulte humaniste is characterized by the same thirst for truth and scientific rigor that formed the basis of Cujas's critical engagement with the Roman legal tradition. This explains why the book has already won several prizes, including the Prix Corbay of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences at the Institut de France. Interestingly, Prévost's research demonstrates that legal humanists such as Cujas were much more indebted to the medieval ius commune than modern textbooks tend to acknowledge. He also highlights the profound divisions, if not enmities, between the legal humanists themselves, such as between Cujas and Hugues Doneau or, for that matter, Jean Bodin and Cujas. Bodin despised the prince of the jurist-philologists for his lack of familiarity with legal practice.

Prévost tries to offer a more nuanced picture, arguing that Cujas was not just an ivory tower scholar but a practice-oriented jurist engaged in the legal disputes of his day. After treating Cujas as a philologist and a humanist scholar in the first part of his monograph, Prévost therefore dedicates the second part to Cujas's contribution to debates in the fields of succession law and feudal law. Whether that sufficiently demonstrates the practical orientation of Cujas's work remains to be seen. Even when discussing problems that arose in practice, such as the succession to the Portuguese Crown, the solutions offered by Cujas remain rather speculative in nature, and there is no evidence that he was actually involved in this dispute as an official adviser to any of the parties involved. Similarly, Cujas's engagement with feudal law leads him to discuss juridical issues resulting from feudal relationships, but that does not mean that he was actually consulted frequently in concrete cases. Moreover, Prévost clarifies in the prolegomena to his book that most of the offices and professional jobs that were offered to Cujas were of a mere symbolic nature (71). For example, King Charles IX immediately provided a derogation from actual judicial duties after conferring upon Cujas the title of Counsellor in the Parliament of Grenoble. Similarly, Prévost expresses serious doubts as to whether Cujas's offices as a counsellor to the Duke of Savoie and, later, as an adviser to the Duke d'Alençon, implied more than just honorific titles.

As a result, the image of Cujas as an erudite scholar who remained aloof from both legal practice and political life predominates after one reads this excellent monograph, which will undoubtedly remain the new reference work on Cujas for decades to come, a bit like Jean-Louis Thireau's monograph on Charles Du Moulin. Yet, it leaves plenty of room for further research. After reading Prévost's magnificent work, other scholars might want to explore further the substance of Cujas's legal thought, contextualize his work within European—as opposed to just French—legal humanism, or investigate the tremendous Nachleben of Cujas's philological engagements with Roman law.