45 rules concerning the indicia requisite for torture reflect the central powers’ need to make compromises with the estates. On the edge of the early Modern Age, the developing German central territorial forces were still far fromall-powerful.^^ Furthermore, as the Middle Ages yielded for the Modern Age, the Aristotelian premises on which the statutory theory of proof had rested began to be increasingly threatened by the rising philosophical empiricism. 4. The Statutory Theory Loses Its Grip — the System of Legal Proof Dismantling To medieval schoolmen, in order for a proposition to be scientific and true it needed to be universal, necessary and certain.’ Probability was not a completely unknown concept in medieval thought; however, it was attributed to opinion, whereas only certainty was scientific and pertained to the sphere of knowledge.2 Evidence for certain knowledge was obtained through the testimony of respected authorities; what was lacking in the Middle Ages was evidence through things or inductive evidence.^ As far as epistemology is concerned, great changes swept across the postRenaissance European intellectual community. Philosophical and scientific ideas embodied in the works of Copernicus, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Locke, and Newton, to name but a few of the most important figures, became the standard reading of Europe’s intellectuals in the seventeenth century - not only of those devoted exclusively or mainly to scientific activity, but of professional groups such as barristers and judges alike.'’ The introduction of methodological empirism by the seventeenth-century rationalists meant that the sharp scholastic dichotomies on which medieval Roman-canon law of proof had been based, such as “science/opinion,” “knowledge/probability,” “certainty/appearance,” and “philosophy/rhetoric,” started to disintegrate. Instead, the seventeenth-century empirist preferred to talk in terms of a continuumalong which matters of knowledge were seen to fall. The lower end of this continuum would be conceived of as “fiction,” “mere opinion,” or “conjecture”; a more certain grade of knowledge would be “probable” or “highly probable”; and, finally, the highest form of knowledge Sec Strauss 1986 pp. 241-296. ' Byrne 1968 p. 168. B\ rnc refers to St. Thomas of Aquinas in particular. - Hacking 1975 pp. 18-30; Kantola 1994 pp. 30-31. ’ In the 1600s, a distinction between external (of testimony) and internal (of things) evidence arises. Hacking 1975 pp. 32-38. The medieval probability can be called subjective and the modern concept objective probability, although Kantola states that seeds of modern thinkingcan be traced to St. Thomas Aquinas. Kantola 1994 pp. 59-63. Shapiro 1983 p. 167 and Foucault 1970 pp. 57-58.
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