The Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1535-1624) is one of the most misunderstood authors in the history of political thought. His treatise De rege et regis institutione libri tres (1599) is dedicated to Philip III of Spain. It was to present the principles of statecraft by which the young king was to abide. Yet soon after its publication, Catholic and Calvinist politiques in France started branding Mariana a regicide. De rege was said to empower the private individual to kill a legitimate king. Its...

This book presents one of the first studies of the Renaissance notion of conscience, through examining theological manuals, legal treatises, letters and other sources of the period.Represents one of the few modern studies exploring developments in scholastic and Renaissance notions of conscienceSynthesizes literary, theological and historical approachesPresents case studies from England and the Hispanic World that reveal shared traditions, strategies, and ...

Gathering a group of internationally renowned scholars, this volume presents cutting-edge research on the complex processes of identity formation in the transatlantic world of the Hispanic Baroque. Identities in the Hispanic world are deeply intertwined with sociological concepts such as class and estate, with geography and religion (i.e. the mixing of Spanish Catholics with converted Jews, Muslims, Dutch and German Protestants), and with issues related to the ethnic diversity of the world...

Why would a Latin Qur'an be addressed to readers who knew no Latin? What happens when translators work on paper rather than parchment? Why would a Jewish rabbi translate a bible for Christians? How can a theorist successfully criticize a version of Aristotle without knowing any Greek? Why were children used to bring down an Amerindian civilization? Why does the statue of Columbus in Barcelona point straight to Israel? Why should a Nicaraguan poet cite a French poem in order to explain a vo...

The Rights of War and Peace is the first fully historical account of the formative period of modern theories of international law. It sets the scene with an extensive history of the theory of international relations from antiquity down to the seventeenth century. Professor Tuck then examines the arguments over the moral basis for war and international aggression, and links the debates to the writings of the great political theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. This is not on...

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590) directed the composition of an encyclopaedic work on the world of the Nahuas, Universal History of the Things of New Spain (ca. 1577-1579), for which he has received the title of pioneering ethnographer and anthropologist of colonial Mexico. Contextualizing Sahagún and his work in sixteenth-century Spain and America, this study presents him as a cultural translator who reconceptualized the Nahua world according to his own Euro-Christian categorization...

Freedom, today perceived simply as a human right, was a continually contested idea in the early modern period. In Freedom and the Construction of Europe an international group of scholars explore the richness, diversity and complexity of thinking about freedom in the shaping of modernity. Volume 1 examines debates about religious and constitutional liberties, as well as exploring the tensions between free will and divine omnipotence across a continent of proliferating religious denominatio...

A group of men dig a tunnel under the threshold of a house. Then they go and fetch a heavy, sagging object from inside the house, pull it out through the tunnel, and put it on a cow-hide to be dragged off and thrown into the offal-pit. Why should the corpse of a suicide – for that is what it is– have earned this unusual treatment? In The Curse on Self-Murder, the second volume of his three-part Suicide in the Middle Ages, Alexander Murray explores the origin of the condem...

This volume surveys 150 law books of fundamental importance in the history of Western legal literature and culture. The entries are organized in three sections: the first dealing with the transitional period of fifteenth-century editions of medieval authorities, the second spanning the early modern period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and the third focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors are scholars from all over the world. Each ‘old book’ is a...

This is a book about the theory of the city or commonwealth, what would come to be called the state, in early modern natural law discourse. Annabel Brett takes a fresh approach by looking at this political entity from the perspective of its boundaries and those who crossed them. She begins with a classic debate from the Spanish sixteenth century over the political treatment of mendicants, showing how cosmopolitan ideals of porous boundaries could simultaneously justify the freedoms of itin...

"What makes this work so exciting is not simply its content . . . but its revolutionary challenge to . . . Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." — NewsweekJohn Boswell's National Book Award–winning study of the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the early Christian West was a groundbreaking work that challenged preconceptions about the Church's past relationship to its gay members—among them priests, bishops, and even saints—when it ...

What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule?It is to these questions that Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book reconstructs in detail the life of the monks with their obsessive attention to temporal articul...