Paradigms and Operational Rules in Contract Law: ‘Theological Consensualism’ and the Theory of a ‘Juridical Theology’ Applied to the Consent Principle

Through the use of the interdisciplinary methodological approach developed by Monateri, I question the purely positivistic concept of 'legal knowledge' understood as that set of practices and procedures capable of producing law in a given historical period and I support the thesis that there is a kind of 'legal theology' at the origin of the modern idea of contractual consent. In a medieval world characterised by pluralism and a dislocation of knowledge and its discursive practices very different from today's, Roman law and Christian theology contributed decisively to the creation of new legal paradigms. Through the progressive secularisation of thought and society, these paradigms were then reworked on different conceptual bases and deprived of the metaphysical-theological background that had produced them. The reconstruction proposed arrives at the evidence that a kind of 'theological consensualism' in the field of contractual agreements was already an operational reality on the continent in the aftermath of the so-called 'legal revolution' of the 11th century, even though it was built on conceptual assumptions quite different from those traditionally enunciated by comparatists.