Medieval legal and political thought encompasses the period from approximately 500 CE to 1500 CE. The term “Medieval” refers to the legal and political thought from the time of the late Roman Empire to that of the Renaissance. The legal and political thought of the Middle Ages is overwhelmingly characterized by the increasing role that religion played in influencing politics and law. By the high Middle Ages, we find the great theorists, Averroes, Maimonides, and Aquinas linking law to their respective religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. This book argues that the so-called Dark Ages had very significant ideas about the law, especially how violence is to be contained, which make this early Medieval period anything but “Dark.” It suggests that the Christianization and Islamization of legal and political thought created almost as many problems as solutions to the increasingly diverse times that arose in the middle of the Middle Ages. The book also shows that the late Middle Ages already held many of the most important legal and political ideas of the Renaissance–showing that there was no clear break from the Medieval to the Modern periods of legal and political thought. Of central importance is the way that the development of the idea of conscience made the natural law theories of the Medieval times a robust set of ideas that is still felt quite strongly today.
This volume continues the story of European political theorising by focusing on medieval and Renaissance thinkers. It includes extensive discussion of the practices that underpinned medieval political theories and which continued to play crucial roles in the eventual development of early-modern political institutions and debates. The author strikes a balance between trying to understand the philosophical cogency of medieval and Renaissance arguments on the one hand, elucidating why historically-suited medieval and Renaissance thinkers thought the ways they did about politics; and why we often think otherwise.
Why did European civilisation develop as it did? Why was it so different from that of Russia, the Islamic world and elsewhere? In this new textbook Antony Black explores some of the reasons, looking at ideas of the state, law, rulership, representation of the community, and the right to self-administration, and how, during a crucial period these became embedded in people's self-awareness, and articulated and justified by theorists. This is the first concise overview of a period never previously treated satisfactorily as a whole: Dr Black uses the analytical tools of scholars such as Pocock and Skinner to set the work of political theorists in the context of both contemporary politics and the longer-term history of political ideas. The book provides students of both medieval history and political thought with an accessible and lucid introduction to the early development of certain ideas fundamental to the organisation of the modern world and contains a full bibliography to assist students wishing to pursue the subject in greater depth.
This collection of studies in the history of political thought from late antiquity to the early-eighteenth century ranges broadly across themes of kingship, political theology, constitutional ideas, natural-law thinking and consent theory. The studies are linked together by three shared characteristics. First, all of them explore the continuities that existed during those centuries between legal/political thinking and theology. Second, nearly all of them transgress the sharp dividing line traditionally drawn between the medieval" and the " modern" which did so much in the past to distort our understanding of intellectual developments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Third, all of them raise historiographic questions or probe the metahistorical/methodological questions which have troubled the field for the past quarter-century and more."
This volume brings together eleven articles by a distinguished medieval scholar. The major emphasis is on legal thought that resulted from the revival of Roman law at Bologna and on the influence this thought had on medieval "constitutionalism." Includes such important studies as “A Romano-Canonical Maxim, Quod Omnes Tangit, in Bracton,” and “Status Regis and Lestat du Roi in the Statute of York.” Originally published in 1964. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This book explores the emergence of the fundamental political concepts of medieval Jewish thought, arguing that alongside the well known theocratic elements of the Bible there exists a vital tradition that conceives of politics as a necessary and legitimate domain of worldly activity that preceded religious law in the ordering of society. Since the Enlightenment, the separation of religion and state has been a central theme in Western political history and thought, a separation that upholds the freedom of conscience of the individual. In medieval political thought, however, the doctrine of the separation of religion and state played a much different role. On the one hand, it served to maintain the integrity of religious law versus the monarch, whether canon law, Islamic law, or Jewish law. On the other hand, it upheld the autonomy of the monarch and the autonomy of human political agency against theocratic claims of divine sovereignty and clerical authority. Postulating the realm of secular politics leads the author to construct a theory of the precedence of politics over religious law in the organization of social life. He argues that the attempts of medieval philosophers to understand religion and the polity provide new perspectives on the viability of an accommodation between revelation and legislation, the holy and the profane, the divine and the temporal. The book shows that in spite of the long exile of the Jewish people, there is, unquestionably, a tradition of Jewish political discourse based on the canonical sources of Jewish law. In addition to providing a fresh analysis of Maimonides, it analyzes works of Nahmanides, Solomon ibn Adret, and Nissim Gerondi that are largely unknown to the English-speaking reader. Finally, it suggests that the historical corpus of Jewish political writing remains vital today, with much to contribute to the ongoing debates over church-state relations and theocratic societies.