1
Introduction
Without her [this science of politics] it would not be possible to live either together in public or privately, nor to deal with human beings and their affairs at all. For, by honouring and rewarding of virtue, and condemning and punishing vice, and by making all our actions upright, she has given us a way of living together happily, in peace and concord, and with plenty.1
In 1567 the French humanist and scholar Louis Le Roy published a brief treatise On the Origin, Antiquity, Progress, Excellence and Usefulness of Politics. Le Roy, like many of his contemporaries, believed he was living through troubled and unsettled times, but was convinced that the study of politics was one important way of restoring peace and prosperity to his native land. In 1567 Le Roy felt the need to justify his claim, finding the roots of political science (as he often termed it) in the classical world while showing how ancient precepts could be updated to fit the new realities of his own age. Half a century later, however, the value of political science was well established and in 1608 one German scholar could even liken it to a lush but sprawling estate. In his view, ‘the boundaries of political science [Politica] are so wide, its possessions so rich and diffuse, that its rule is disordered in many things’—and what was now needed was for some proper method and order in the discipline.2 He was to be disappointed, for no single method triumphed in this period. Yet the fascination with political thought grew, among scholars, statesmen, and a growing segment of the public.
By 1625 political thought was certainly diverse and diffuse, and yet even without a unifying method it is possible to see some core themes within it. Most importantly, this period saw a concern to understand the political or civil community as bounded, limited in geographical terms and with its own particular structures, characteristics, and history. Political science had therefore to be separated from ethics or philosophy, which dealt with individual virtues or with universal truths. Its aim was to ensure the survival and prosperity of one political unit; it needed to be sensitive to time and place. This did not mean abandoning the quest for universal values, but it did shape the way those values were understood. The second, and related, development was a growing focus on civil or
1 Louis Le Roy, De l’origine, antiquité, progrès, excellence et utilité de l’art politique (Paris, 1567), p. 10.
2 G. Paulus, preface to B. Keckermann, Systema Disciplinae Politicae (Hanau, 1608).
lGu f o f Findlan
political authority as distinct from the Church or religious authority. Although some writers advocated the independence of the political sphere, this was highly unusual. Most sought instead to tease out and explain the relationship between these two authorities, in order to understand the scope but also the limitations of politics, as a discipline geared towards earthly rather than heavenly goals. A final theme is the increasingly detailed analyses of structures and institutions, analyses which also began to take into account the impact of social and economic change. As new men rose and as some of the old aristocracies declined, older theories of order and status within society were adapted and rewritten, sometimes allowing for social mobility and sometimes seeking to restrict it.
These broad themes were, it will be suggested, common across Europe and can also be seen in the Ottoman empire, as well as (to a lesser extent) in the Safavid and Mughal empires. In part this was because so many of the traditions that shaped political thinking can be traced back to the ancient world and constituted a shared intellectual heritage. Furthermore, the processes of economic change, particularly the monetarization of the economy and the development of new military technologies, were not restricted to one area and their impact could be felt across a range of different societies. Yet there were also important differences; in the West the Christian Church had institutionalized a separation between clergy and laity which was not so firmly established in Islamic societies, and the Reformation led to a heated and multifaceted debate in Europe about the relationship between the Church and the civil authorities. Indeed, it was in those areas where religious tensions ran high, and where localized political loyalties were simultaneously both entrenched and vulnerable, that some of the most innovative and influential political thinking took place. Just as soldiers took up arms to defend their homelands, so scholars took up their pens in the service of their community, anxious to legitimize that community. By the end of the period, some writers were keen to do so by appeal to principles which, while still religious, were explicitly detached from particular confessional commitments.
The book begins in the 1510s, a decade of heightened imperial and religious excitement, and ends in 1625, with the publication of Hugo Grotius’s groundbreaking treatise On the Rights of War and Peace, which explicitly sought to distance civil authority and natural law from Christianity. Grotius, a Dutch jurist and historian, was no friend of the Habsburg empire against which his native land had long been struggling, and his work was also an attempt to justify the diverse political arrangements which prevailed across Europe, protecting local customs and arrangements. Yet Grotius was himself invested in the pursuit of certain kinds of colonial projects, he had written in defence of one of the Dutch trading companies, and he spent the final years of his life hard at work on a series of theological texts, including a landmark commentary on the books of the Bible. As his example demonstrates, the period did not see a retreat from religion or an exclusive focus on sovereignty and on the emerging nation states. But it did see a new
Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires in
interest in theorizing and justifying local political communities, where civil authority was seen as independent of confessional orthodoxy and of the Church.
Defining the scope of a study of political thought is difficult. I have chosen to concentrate on the early modern discussion of just what it is that constitutes a political community, and on how early modern authors explained its distinctive character. I have emphasized those debates which are recognizably part of the history of political thought rather than any broader category of intellectual history; and I have prioritized those texts or parts of texts which discuss, more or less explicitly, how a community should be governed or arranged in order to ensure thisworldly values of peace and prosperity. The focus of the book is, therefore, on the ideas and concepts which we associate today with political theory, but I have sought to understand the early modern debate in its own terms. Often those texts were written by authors with strong views about the broader purposes of human life, and my aim has been to show how their visions of political science fit into their overarching concerns and aspirations. Very often, early modern interest in these ideas was driven not by narrowly political agendas but by a wider concern to understand the role and rationale of the earthly community for human beings whose ultimate purpose lay elsewhere.
Though the book does not offer a linear narrative of the development of a modern style of political thought, it does seek to draw out the key themes which shaped the political ideas of this period and of future generations. In this sense, it is an account of the intellectual possibilities opening up and the resources becoming available; it outlines the shape of the debates as they unfolded. The following account does not prioritize any particular ideological concept, such as liberty, virtue, or representation, but it does seek to show how early modern people wrestled with a range of ways of theorizing their communities, drawing on ideas current in legal, theological, and classical writing as they did so. I have drawn attention to these theorists’ creation of boundaries, between Church and state, between one political community and another, between the individual and the ruler. And I have intended this book to be both broad and focused, indicating the wide variety of political thinking at the time.
At the core of my account are the early modern debates about the basic concepts of legitimacy, particularly natural law. The idea of natural law as a set of universal moral principles can be found in ancient philosophy and in many religious traditions including Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, though opinions differed as to the precise content and origins of this law. In the early modern period, it proved to be a particularly complex and contested concept; it offered a means of analysing, defending, and critiquing authority and could be applied across political and territorial borders. Arguments from natural law became common across Europe, as scholars and writers appealed to different versions of natural law as they worked for their own diverse ends. Natural law could be invoked in order to
build up state power, to defend the legitimacy of resistance, or to pronounce upon the authority of the Church. In a context of political and religious upheaval, many writers appealed to natural law as a stable source of authority and morality, although their increasing awareness of the diversity of human societies led some to question the validity and force of a law which was supposed to apply to all people.
Meanwhile, and particularly in the wake of the Reformation, early modern Europeans were particularly anxious to understand the relationship between natural law and Christian ethics. This was a crucial issue because the value of natural law stemmed in large part from the shared belief that God himself upheld and endorsed it, a belief that was, as we shall see, much less straightforward than has commonly been realized. Although it had long been pointed out that the ethics of the Christian New Testament were not especially conducive to political success, this claim became more common in the sixteenth century. It was articulated most notoriously by the Italian humanist Nicolò Machiavelli, but on this point—if on little else—he was joined by many radical Christians, particularly those associated with the Anabaptist movement. At the same time, the exigencies of war, statebuilding, and political survival required new powers for rulers which often seemed to exist in serious tension with Christian teaching. Thus a large part of the project of political theory was showing how these new powers had a place in the divine scheme and could be both legitimate and effective.
There were a number of different approaches to natural law and the book traces these out across several chapters. Chapter 2 shows how the expansion of empires in the first decades of the sixteenth century led to renewed interest in the sources and scope of law, and the relationship between law that was often conceptualized in universal or cosmopolitan terms as well as embodied in local political practice. I then suggest that the groundwork for the sixteenthcentury debate on natural law was laid in the 1510s, before the Reformation and during the controversy over the Council of Pisa. In these years, some churchmen wanted to use natural law as a moral standard which applied to the Church as well as to civil communities, while others insisted that the Church, founded as it was by Christ himself, stood above the law of nature. Soon all sides agreed that the civil community could be understood in terms of natural law, but because they differed about the place of the Church, they also differed about the value of natural law itself and its reach. Was it a universal moral standard, or was it inferior to the Christian ethics and morals upheld by the Church? Meanwhile, the new thinking starting to emerge in Italy from the pens of men like Machiavelli led to a heightened sense of the potential conflict between political success and the Christian faith. These tensions would be exacerbated after the Reformation, when leading Protestant writers would come to argue that the natural law and the principles of Christian ethics were one and the same. This had the dual advantage of solidifying political
authority and allowing magistrates to take control of their Church—just so long as they upheld the natural and divine law. Many Catholics, on the other hand, tended no longer to see natural law as applicable to the Church and instead limited its scope to the civil community.
As the century went on, some writers came increasingly to appeal to the normative principles of natural law in order to provide a framework for human social life. Indeed, I argue that the appeal to popular sovereignty was quickly coupled with a strong set of claims about the natural law, because ‘the people’ had an alarming tendency to support the wrong movements. Protestants and humanists found that people were too often swayed by Catholicism, while Catholics feared that their countrymen put peace above the true faith. Meanwhile, the need to translate those normative principles into real and effective action led to important discussions of concepts of representation, covenant, and contract. It was generally agreed that the people’s authority needed to be wielded by responsible and legitimate officers, though whether these should be magistrates, aristocrats, or priests was hotly contested and a range of different arguments were offered in defence of these different claims.
While some writers saw natural law as a stable, universal system, others believed that discretion was necessary, either within it or beyond it; those in power needed the freedom to adapt laws and policies as circumstances changed around them. The key author here was the French jurist Jean Bodin, who defined sovereignty as, primarily, the power to make laws—but who placed sovereign power within as wider conceptual setting dominated by what he called ‘harmonic justice’. This was a dynamic balance between Aristotle’s two different kinds of justice: distributive and arithmetic, constantly adapting to the different needs and circumstances of time and place. Bodin argued that the sovereign’s role in maintaining this balance was analogous to God’s and he downplayed the need for any additional religious authority. Although he gave great discretion to the sovereign, he also argued that there were principles of the natural law, notably the binding nature of contracts, to which the sovereign must himself adhere. In the wake of Bodin’s work, the question of sovereignty became much more pressing, not least because Bodin’s view of sovereignty was seen as incompatible with the Catholic insistence on the role of the Church. One response to this was a Catholic ‘reason of state’, which blended Christianity and political pragmatism, thereby avoiding questions of sovereignty; another was the increasingly sophisticated explication of papal ‘indirect’ power designed to allow civil power genuine autonomy, at least in its own, natural sphere. Finally, some authors, Catholic and Protestant, insisted that monarchy was the best form of government, endorsed by God himself, articulating the theory that would become known as the ‘divine right of kings’.
As the discussion of sovereignty became more complex and sophisticated, scholars began to analyse more fully the relationship between sovereign power
and society, particularly as social hierarchies seemed to be shifting. The changing methods of warfare meant that states needed more money and more bureaucracy; knowledge of politics and administration was becoming a route to power and influence while the old aristocracies were coopted into more centralized states, with differing degrees of success. Those writing political theory tended, on the whole, to defend meritocracy and the distribution of office according to virtue and ability; certainly they were often very critical of the sale of office. But they had little desire to see radical social change, and they expected the sovereign to uphold and maintain, at least in broad terms, the stratified society he ruled. Meanwhile, in the Ottoman Empire the changing economic and military circumstances also led to new analyses of office holding and justice, often understood as the correct balance between the different classes.
Thus, this book is a study of political thought which places it within the broader systems of ethics, law, and religion operating in the sixteenth century. It does not assume the primacy of the political and it takes seriously the notion that what the ‘political’ is will always be contested. Nevertheless, by examining what early modern people thought constituted a political community, I hope to show how the history of political thought can both benefit from, and remain distinctive within, the wider field of intellectual history. I have also sought to make connections between Christian Europe and the Muslim states that lay to its south and east, lands where religious authority was less clearly institutionalized and where religious and political power were more closely intertwined. Like Western Christians, Muslims and others had to work out how to view political power which sometimes seemed at odds with religious teaching, and how to understand the process of change through time.
Early modern authors thought about politics using a range of different discourses, or what John Pocock has referred to as ‘languages’, and they wrote in a range of different genres. My account prioritizes the languages of law, especially natural and Roman law, but it acknowledges that there were alternative languages, particularly those based upon historical research and scriptural commentary, which could also be used to examine the nature of a political community.3 The boundaries between these languages were porous, yet the expertise required to master each of them meant that in practice authors tended to prioritize one or other. Often the choice of language was shaped by the genre within which the work was imagined, and in the sixteenth century political ideas came to be discussed across a widening range of genres. Systematic works written by trained academics, lawyers, and theologians offered the most explicit reflections on
3 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Concept of a Language and the Métier d’Historien: Some Considerations on Practice’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, edited by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 19–38; Mark Goldie, ‘The Ancient Constitution and the Languages of Political Thought’, The Historical Journal 62 (2019), pp. 3–34.
political thought, though the sixteenth century did also see a steady increase in the number of pamphlets, sermons, plays, and other works of imaginative literature, many of which offered direct or indirect commentrary on political ideas. I have foregrounded those writers who dealt explicitly and systematically with political questions, while suggesting more briefly the ways in which a range of early modern authors touched upon those questions. Given the academic training and resources necessary to enter into printed debate about political thought, it is perhaps not surprising that it was largely the preserve of a male elite. Very few women had access to the same experiences or opportunities, even if at times they wielded significant political power; by the seventeenth century, however, the balance was shifting and women began to enter more fully into political debate.4
That the sixteenth century was a seminal period in the history of political thought has long been acknowledged. The claim is today perhaps most familiar from Quentin Skinner’s highly influential Foundations of Modern Political Thought, published in 1978. Skinner placed the origins of the modern state in what he called the Ages of Renaissance and Reformation; by 1600, he argued, ‘the concept of the State had come to be regarded as the most important object of analysis in European political thought’.5 But Skinner was also keen to show that it was not the religious ideas of the period which drove the move towards modernity, but rather a new theory of popular sovereignty which was independent of religion. That theory enabled Europeans to see the state as separate from its ruler and so to resist the absolutist monarchies being consolidated as the sixteenth century drew to a close. Skinner argued forcefully that the important intellectual achievement of this period was the creation of ‘purely secular and wholly populist doctrines’ which would then be ‘available to be used by all parties in the coming constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century’.6 Skinner suggested that although these constitutionalist arguments had developed in a religious context, their theological elements could be discarded—although the impact of such an alteration remained unclear from his work. In Foundations, Skinner made an elegant and persuasive case for the importance of early modern political thought, but by insisting on its increasing independence from religion he closed off a series of crucial questions about the relationship between the two, and particularly about the relationship between natural law, political obligation, and Christianity. In the chapters that follow I have tried to reopen some of those questions and to show how important ideas of religion could be to the development of political thought—even in its most apparently secular or civil guises.
4 The development of women’s political thinking is discussed in Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge, 2009).
5 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1978), p. 349.
6 Ibid., p. 347.
Historians have not, of course, ignored the complex interplay between religion and political ideas in this period, although they have tended to focus on the tension between the two. In the 1920s, the German historian Frederick Meinecke argued that Nicolò Machiavelli was the first to see that politics sometimes required tragic choices, a commitment to empirical necessity rather than the moral law. For Meinecke, the writing of this Italian humanist posed a serious challenge to the belief that individual morality would lead to political success and suggested that ethics, particularly Christian ethics, may not in fact be compatible with politics.7 This fed into the tradition which became known as reason of state, a tradition in which political prudence was separate from morality or Christianity and geared towards the welfare and survival of the state rather than to any abstract or universal standard of ethics. Yet although this was a language of statecraft rather than law or morality, it soon became intertwined with the concept of natural law, as Richard Tuck has shown. Indeed, he argued for a ‘remarkable transformation’ of the culture of raison d’état ‘into the great natural law theories of the mid [seventeenth] century’.8 In Tuck’s view, Hugo Grotius was particularly creative in showing how a natural law theory could be based upon the concept of (individual) natural rights, and could resist sceptical critique by insisting that natural rights flowed from the universally acknowledged principle of selfpreservation. Grotius could therefore provide a conceptual foundation for natural law which was not only independent of Christianity but also detached from classical accounts of morality or virtue.
In Tuck’s account, the ‘modern’ natural law developed by Grotius provided the most important element of a new theory of both sovereignty and individual liberty, one which would be articulated most powerfully by Thomas Hobbes. In the writing of both Hobbes and Grotius, he argued, the sovereign was accorded immense power but, at the same time, that power depended upon contract and upon the people’s consent; it existed to preserve the people and could in principle allow a high degree of religious and philosophical toleration. Yet, as studies of the reception of Grotius and Hobbes have shown, seventeenthcentury readers struggled to understand how their theory of natural law could in fact oblige human beings, let alone Christians. The roots of this problem—and early modern answers to it—lie in the debates of the sixteenth century, when political science, natural law, and natural right first began to be analysed as distinct from, but related to, Christianity. In the following chapters I show how the problem of the obligation of natural law, indeed of the principles of statecraft and prudence, was already live in some scholarly circles even before Grotius’s intervention in the debate. I emphasize that the early modern language of sovereignty was, from its inception,
7 F. Meinecke, Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte (Munich, 1924), translated by D. Scott as, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and Its Place in Modern History (London, 1957).
8 Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), p. xiv.
designed to challenge the authority of ecclesiastical power; its proponents understood that a powerful civil state was often the best guarantor of individual liberty. But I demonstrate that this language of sovereignty was not secular or religiously neutral, for its proponents understood that it could only be seen as valid and obligatory if it were anchored in the divine will, even if that will tended to be understood in heterodox ways.
For all the innovation of early modern political thought, scholars still drew heavily and creatively on the writings of ancient philosophers, particularly those of Rome and Greece—and historians continue to assess the role and importance of this classical legacy. Perhaps the most important resource for early modern scholars in their efforts to understand political science was the writings of Aristotle, and the vitality of this Aristotelian tradition has increasingly been recognized. The central concepts within it were justice, particularly the just distribution of office, honour, and reward within the community, and the balance between unity and diversity among the citizens. One of my aims in this book has been to show how integral these themes were to sixteenthcentury thinking, especially to early modern thinkers who sought to understand just what it was that held their own particular polity together, and what might limit the claims it could make on its citizens.9 I have indicated the rich and varied use made of the classical heritage, but particularly this Aristotelian tradition with its concern for justice and unity, and therefore for the correct distribution of power, office and status within the community. Drawing on work on the Ottoman Empire, I have also suggested that these concerns were not limited to Europe, although they played out differently in a different political, religious, and intellectual context.
Within the current discipline of the history of political thought, an earlier focus on the state and on sovereignty has been supplemented by a new attention to relationships between human beings and the different authorities under which they lived—issues which often loomed large in classical and medieval thinking. Annabel Brett, for example, suggests we should place the state within a broader juridical landscape, with the state as just one institution among others.10 Among those institutions were, of course, the Church and the religious orders, both of which functioned as alternative loci of allegiance, and scholars have explored the political thinking generated by men whose loyalty to the state was necessarily conditional.11 Meanwhile, powerful notions of honour and service continued to shape political action and political ideas, and studies of the intellectual world of
9 E.g. Annabel Brett, ‘The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth: Thomas Hobbes and Late Renaissance Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics’, Hobbes Studies 23 (2010), pp. 72–102; Noah Dauber, State and Commonwealth: The Theory of the State in Early Modern England, 1549–1640 (Princeton, 2016).
10 Annabel Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton, 2011).
11 E.g. Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (Cambridge, 2004); Christoph Strohm, Ethik im frühen Calvinismus: Humanistische Einflüsse,
particular noblemen have highlighted the creative ways in which they fashioned themselves and their image. They have also drawn attention to the growing interest in this period in the education of the young, but especially young nobles.12 Like those studies, this current book recognizes that ‘political’ thought cannot be studied in isolation, for early modern conceptions of the political were shaped and conditioned by wider commitments, be they ethical, religious, or familial.
As historians have placed the state within wider intellectual landscape, they have also become increasing interested in how early modern people conceived of an international human community. The sixteenth century has long been seen as a foundational moment in the history of international law, with the discovery of the New World prompting earlymodern Spanish scholars in particular to develop sophisticated accounts of what we might now think of as international law. Modern translation projects have made those early modern texts easily available to modern readers, and the ongoing relevance of the issues with which they deal—especially empire and international intervention—have ensured a steady stream of scholarship on these themes.13 This has helped to dilute an earlier concentration on the internal structure of states, but it has also raised questions about how contemporaries understood the wider laws and norms which applied to their own political community as well as to the international sphere. In a period when empires were emerging and being challenged, and the boundaries between states were far from fixed, writers and statesmen discussed the scope and limits of their own political community within the context of these wider international communities. Whether they sought to defend expansionist policies, or to protect their homeland from the exactions of an imperial power, their writings helped to define both local and international political thought—as I have sought to indicate. Recent studies have drawn our attention to the importance of imaginative literature in shaping early modern ideas of community, both local and international. The ideas developed in William Shakespeare’s plays, for example, have long been of interest to political theorists as well as historians and literary scholars.14 Meanwhile the interplay between legal scholarship, poetry, and prose has been philosophische, juristische und theologische Argumentationen sowie mentalitätsgeschichtliche Aspekte am Beispiel des Calvin-Schülers Lambertus Danaeus (Berlin, 1996).
12 E.g. Arlette Jouanna, Le devoir de révolte: la noblesse française et la gestation de l’État moderne, 1559–1661 (Paris, 1989); Alexandra Gajda, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford, 2012); Mark Bannister, Condé in Context: Ideological Change in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford, 2000).
13 Much of this is summarized in Edward Keene, International Political Thought: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge, 2005); see also two recent collections: Martti Koskenniemi, Walter Rech, and Manuel Jiménez Fonseca, eds, International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations (Oxford, 2017) and Martti Koskenniemi, Mónica GarcíaSalmones Rovira, and Paolo Amorosa, eds, International Law and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford, 2017).
14 For example: David Armitage, Conal Condren, and Andrew Fitzmaurice, eds, Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2009); Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, 2005).
examined in greater depth, especially as scholars have recognized the rhetorical dimension to so much early modern thinking about justice and law. The ‘rich threeway conversations’ between law, literature, and history form the basis, for example, of a recent Oxford Handbook.15 In the pages that follow I have indicated some of the connections between early modern works of fiction and political thought; more broadly I have suggested some of the ways in which political thinking required imagination and a willingness to place oneself outside existing conceptual structures.
Although most historians of early modern political thought have focused on Europe, particularly Western Europe, there are a growing number of studies which range beyond this area. In an important collection of essays entitled European Political Thought 1450–1700, the editors explain that one of their intentions was to explore the diversity of European thinking and to draw the boundaries of Europe widely, including chapters on Muscovy and on the Ottoman Empire.16 Meanwhile, the study of Ottoman political thought has thrived recently, and the publication of Marinos Sariyannis’ A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Nineteenth Century in 2019 was a major landmark in this field. This new scholarship has allowed historians to make more informed comparisons across political and religious boundaries, deepening our appreciation of both the diversity of political thinking and the common themes within it.
As even such a brief survey will suggest, my book is deeply indebted to the works of previous scholars but it also offers my own interpretation of the period. I am sympathetic to many of the claims made for the creativity of early modern political thought, especially its new emphasis on the state and on the independence of natural law from Christianity. But I also argue that these ideas emerged in dialogue with theology, and with classical ideas of justice, empire, and universal laws; and I draw attention to the role of social as well as constitutional structures in the writing of political theorists. In this way I have tried to offer an account which suggests the richness of early modern political thinking, indicating the central themes of the period and the key questions which troubled, engaged, and excited the people of the sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries. Those questions, fundamentally about the nature, the boundaries, and the legitimacy of the political community, are questions still asked by human beings today, and my hope is that this account will not only be of historical interest but also shed light upon some of our own societies’ answers to those crucial questions.
Although I have tried to include material from beyond the standard canon of political thought, I am acutely aware of the limitations of this study. Its centre of
15 Lorna Hutson, ‘Introduction: Law, Literature and History’, in The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–1700, edited by Lorna Hutson (Oxford, 2017), p. 3.
16 Howell A. Lloyd, Glenn Burgess, and Simon Hodson, eds, European Political Thought, 1450–1700: Religion, Law and Philosophy (New Haven, CT, 2007).
gravity is Western Europe, partly because so much of the surviving literature comes from the conflicts which ravaged this area but partly also because this literature is easily accessible to the modern scholar. I have benefitted greatly from recent work on Ottoman political thought and on theories of kingship in the Islamic world and hope that by including some discussion of these areas this study may help to broaden the geographical field of political thought. As yet, however, there remains relatively little work on the political thought of early modern Orthodox communities, and it has not been possible to include these in the present study.17 A longer study would certainly have included more discussion of the ways in which early modern people themselves reflected on the diversity of political, cultural, and religious institutions, but readers interested in these questions are well served by the works of others, most notably Noel Malcolm’s study of European ideas about the Ottoman Empire or Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s work on ideas of India.18 It is also true that there is comparatively little on the relationship between the state and the household in this study, a topic which is gaining increasing attention and which will no doubt become more prominent in future work.19 But my aim has been to sketch a broad outline of the political thought of this period which, I hope, others will find stimulating and which will give rise to new work and new interpretations.
To make the text as accessible as possible I have provided translations of book titles and quotations, also giving the original version where the text is commonly known by that name. Where possible I have used existing English translations of texts, either contemporary or modern; where no translator is indicated, the translation is my own. I have kept footnotes and references to a minimum, and in referencing primary sources, I have tended to use the first edition and to give page numbers. Where the first edition is not easily accessible either online or as a physical copy, I have included section numbers to aid the reader in finding the relevant passage.
17 For one recent study see Paschalis M. Kitromilides, ‘The Byzantine Legacy in Early Modern Political Thought’, in The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium, edited by Anthony Kaldellis and Niketas Siniossoglou (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 653–68.
18 Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750 (Oxford, 2019; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India—Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (Harvard, 2017).
19 For example, Anna Becker, Gendering the Renaissance Commonwealth (Cambridge, 2019) and Christoph Haar, Natural and Political Conceptions of Community: The Role of Household Society in Jesuit Political Thought c.1590–1650 (Leiden, 2018).
