 The intellectual tradition with which Pufendorf is associated, and to which he was later seen as central, has been variously termed modern, secular, or Protestant. Indeed, the first chapter of his Sample of Controversies (Specimen controversiarum, 1678; in ES) originated the historiography of the genre. (See section 5.2 below.) As critics of that self-interpretation have pointed out and Pufendorf himself admitted, elements of the approach were already present in previous traditions, including Stoicism, Roman law, Christian and scholastic thought (particularly Vitoria, Vasquez, and Suarez), and the Grotius commentary literature (Tierney 1997, Brett 1997, Haakonssen 1998, Seelmann 2000, Oakley 2005, Behme 1996, Hartung 2008, Reibstein 1953–54). Still, Pufendorf and those who shared his outlook claimed a kind of Baconian novelty for their enterprise. This lay in its eschewal of metaphysics and theology as foundations for philosophy, in its rejection of appeals to authority, and in its assertion of an ‘eclectic’ privilege not only to mix and compare different perspectives, but also to place new bodies of knowledge on a so-called scientific footing (BW #137, 1996, p.194; Hochstrasser 2000). The founder (in the sense of first practitioner) of this so-called “noble discipline of natural law” was according to Pufendorf “the incomparable Hugo Grotius,” who “set out to construct a work wherein he was not ruled by the influence of his precedessors” and that resisted the fragmenting tendencies of discrepant opinions (ES 2002b, p. 126). Pufendorf’s assessment was seconded by his French translator, Jean Barbeyrac (1674–1744), who noted too – in his famous Preface (1706), §28 – that with Bacon and Grotius “the Science of Morality was … rais’d again from the Dead” (in DJN 2005 [1729], p. 78), and that it was Pufendorf who had corrected, improved, and systematized it. (§31) 