In a posthumously published apology preceding his commentaries on the state of religion, Johann Sleidan observed that he could not omit political causes because religion and politics always came together and, especially in his day, could not be separated (De statu religionis & reipublicae [Strasbourg 1557], sig. [a viir]). Writing in a heated moment for the fate of Lutheranism in the Holy Roman Empire, Sleidan knew what he was talking about. Religion and faith, power and authority, past and future all came to a head in his work just as it did in others’. In the volume under review Sarah Mortimer surveys a wide range of historians and political theorists, aiming ‘to sketch a broad outline’ of early modern political thought and hoping to stimulate readers and, thereby, ‘give rise to new work and new interpretations’ (p. 16). These comparatively modest aims have been met and, indeed, exceeded.
With an entirely justified and forceful reinsertion of religious concerns into scholarly discussions of political thought as a branch of intellectual history, over the course of eleven chapters Mortimer reaches back into the classical and medieval periods to trace the antecedents for thinkers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Fully aware of the historiographical terrain, she exercises a lightness of touch and resists the temptation to dive deeply into the modern debates; rather, she highlights and investigates authors of divergent traditions and inclinations of the medieval and early modern period. Medieval papalists and conciliarists, like Aquinas and Gerson, respectively, disagreed on church governance, and such differences spilled into wider discussions about the relationship between temporal rule and natural law on the one hand, and religious rule and the supernatural on the other. The European explorations of the New World, and the empires they spawned, gave rise to additional debates on the meanings and significance of political power in a universal sense akin to the universality claimed by religious authorities, and thus the boundaries could be blurred long before Sleidan. Luther, Zwingli and their followers of various degrees sometimes tended to separate the secular and sacred but at others further muddied the waters regarding the human and divine, and here (as elsewhere) Mortimer drives home the point that these realms were in ‘paradoxical tension’ (p. 70). Early reformers became dependent upon political authority for their survival and protection, but the winds of change could come quickly, such that Protestants and Catholics alike could generate theories of resistance against political powers. Mortimer is particularly strong in illustrating that confessional differences did not map neatly onto divergent political theories. Indeed, just as there was a spectrum of belief among Protestants on the dependence or independence of the State and the Church, so too Catholics disagreed among themselves. Moreover, individual writers of one tradition might agree with writers of the other on certain points, but usually with a certain amount of adaptation to circumstances. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, theorists’ increasing concern with resistance and power spurred new discussions. The religious limits and political merits of toleration, the (in)divisibility of sovereignty and absolutism and notions of the ancient constitution(s) of the commonwealth(s) all found plenty of advocates, Protestant as well as Catholic. Ideas regarding Aristotelian virtue guiding the commonwealth could collide with divine right theory just as easily as deceit could cohere with political prudence, for, after all, ‘qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare’. It is all the more suggestive that this coherence was seen by some theorists as a bad thing but by others as a good.
The variety and shifts of opinion so clearly demonstrated by Mortimer is matched by her broad geographical reach. Authors from Spain and Portugal, France and Italy, England and Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth all come together in a balanced discussion that is compared to the Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Savafids and Mughals. Mortimer offers comparisons peppered throughout the book and in a dedicated chapter using scholarship widely accessible to monoglot Anglophones. Here the reader finds that these empires wrestled with some of the same issues of power and authority in religiously diverse lands as did European rulers. The immediate contexts, of course, were distinctive, so different methods were employed to navigate the terrain, as it were; the lack of a printing press in these eastern empires, for example, made for a different situation. Political theorists in Europe were often concerned predominantly with the political situations in their own countries, but by the end of the sixteenth century some Protestants became increasingly concerned with international causes in the wars of religion, thus bringing a universalist vocabulary hitherto used by Catholic apologists to a Protestant audience and for political purposes. The tensions, ambivalences and spectrums of opinion and internationalism of the sixteenth century found culmination in Hugo Grotius’ De jure belli ac pacis, in which he advocated similarly to – but more forcefully than – his predecessors for the separation of politics and religion, with the former completely independent of – and not subordinate in any way to – the latter. Religious claims for universal ethics or virtue, while important, could no longer assert the same level of political power as they once did.
Mortimer is to be congratulated for bringing together such a broad array of authors and geographies, and for structuring the discussion in easily digestible chapters that proceed thematically but also chronologically. For many of her primary sources in French or Latin, for example, she uses translations into English from the early modern period, but one senses a missed opportunity here because more could have been made regarding the multiple audiences these authors could find; translations, adaptations and appropriations can suggest much more than the original author had initially intended. As ever, OUP has produced an aesthetically pleasing book, but the venerated publisher has let down the author by way of general copyediting and the formatting of the bibliography, which is not split into primaries and secondaries. Every book has a typographical error or two, but too many errors and inconsistencies in citation, spelling and grammar occur to go unnoticed. Some very basic issues could have been caught by even a cursory glance of a seasoned and professional copyeditor (for example, the erroneous use of ‘peninsular’ for ‘peninsula’ on pp. 17, 19, 29 and 139; ‘Brünswick-Lüneberg’ for ‘Brunswick-Lüneburg’ on pp. 240, 287; and incomplete, incorrect, or entirely lacking places of publication in many footnotes). One would have hoped that OUP's production would have matched the care and precision of Mortimer's broad outline.
