In preparation
Oxford University Press

The Oxford History of Political Thought · Volume 5

The Renaissance, 1400–1517

Michelle T. Clarke · Under contract

The Oxford History of Political Thought, Volume 5: The Renaissance (1400–1517) is a single-authored synthesis of political thought from the late medieval inheritance to the eve of the Reformation, written for Oxford University Press’s multi-volume Oxford History of Political Thought. It is organized by theme rather than by thinker. It retains the familiar story of the period, centered on Italian humanism, its spread north, and major figures such as Bruni, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Erasmus, and More, while drawing on the past thirty years of scholarship to widen it. The volume also covers the political and intellectual impact of the expanding Ottoman Empire, the emergence of proto-capitalist economies and state-like structures, the gendered character of humanist political ideas, the ties between humanism and mystical traditions, the origins of racism as a modern political ideology, the diversity of fifteenth-century Jewish political thought, and political theorizing in Asia and Africa. Each chapter tells one story about one theme, relates ideas to political, economic, and cultural change, and can be read and taught on its own.

Planned chapters

  1. 1

    Introduction

    Surveys political theory as it stood in the late fourteenth century: the questions, problems, and key concepts inherited from the Middle Ages. Outlines the main developments of 1400–1517 and how scholarship on the Renaissance has changed over the past thirty years.

  2. 2

    New Worlds

    The rediscovery and transmission of ancient texts against a medieval past already rich in classical material. Florentine humanists’ new sense of historical distance fed curiosity about antiquity but raised doubts about whether it could be known or imitated. Humanists also helped invent two identities central to European political thought: ‘modernity’, defined against the ‘dark ages’, and ‘the West’, which Florentines claimed to defend after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. An account of Ottoman political thought corrects humanist stereotypes, and the chapter reviews debates about what humanism was.

  3. 3

    The Politics of Virtue

    Why humanists recovered ancient texts: to find wisdom for unstable and corrupt Italian cities. Drawing above all on Cicero, they argued for true nobility (vera nobilitas), meaning rule by merit cultivated through the studia humanitatis rather than by wealth or birth. The chapter follows humanism in Venice, Rome, Naples, Milan, and Mantua, and two radical challenges to it: Christine de Pizan’s rejection of humanist misogyny and of the idea that its ideals belonged to men alone, and Machiavelli’s claim that the humanists misread antiquity, which in fact reveals a tension between moral and political virtue.

  4. 4

    People and Princes

    Ideas of legitimate government and the institutions meant to realize them, as Italy stood at a crossroads after its communal republics fractured. Covers humanist debates over signorial versus republican rule; the humanist recovery of Roman law from the medieval commentators and its blending with canon and feudal law, contrasted with English common law; Poland’s Nihil Novi act and the rise of parliament; and popular uprisings outside elite discourse, such as Jack Cade’s Rebellion, the Carinthian Peasants’ Revolt, and the Udine carnival massacre, which show how ‘the people’ was defined.

  5. 5

    God, the Church, and Prophetic Power

    How humanism drew on and contested theological claims to political authority. Italian humanism generally assumed that classical culture and Christianity were continuous, and northern humanists such as Reuchlin, Hutten, Erasmus, and More put classical learning to work for Christian renewal, using the figure of Christ, as in Erasmus’s Paraphrases, against corrupt institutions, including the Church. The chapter also covers conciliarism, which drew on Roman law to limit papal power after the Great Schism, and the Lollards, Hussites, Waldensians, and Taborites, who held that the church was the community of believers led by Christ alone.

  6. 6

    Love, Friendship, and Family

    How Renaissance writers imagined the bonds of civic community and its links to marriage, friendship, and family. Christian humanists replaced medieval civic ritual with the imitation of Christ, while others relied on Aristotelian and Ciceronian accounts of natural sociability and friendship; Bruni’s translation of politike as civitas shows the eclipse of the medieval idea of communitas. The household is treated as part of the political realm, with attention to humanist writing on the oikos, the civic values that marriage was thought to embody, and the patriarchal and heteronormative assumptions behind Renaissance political thought.

  7. 7

    Wealth and Inequality

    Economic thought in a Europe reshaped by a rising merchant class. Humanist writing on household management (oikonomia) tried to reconcile ancient ideals with the values of its merchant patrons, balancing glory against profit and praising honesty, frugality, and foresight alongside liberality and magnificence, with some cautious defenses of avarice. The chapter then reconstructs debates over whether economic inequality is a political problem, with wealth defended as a sign of merit or attacked as a threat to liberty, and whether it should be regulated, as in disputes over progressive taxation such as the Florentine catasto.

  8. 8

    Reimagining the International Order

    The fifteenth-century foundations of the sovereign state in Italy, Spain, England, and above all France, in a multipolar Europe before Habsburg consolidation in 1519. Topics include sovereignty in humanist legal theory, the balance of power, debates over knightly castes, citizen militias, and mercenary armies, early ideas of reason of state, the justification and conduct of war, old and new ideas of empire, and the conditions of true peace.

  9. 9

    The Construction of Race

    Argues that the Renaissance saw the birth of racism, understood as belief in a group’s innate and permanent superiority, as distinct from older xenophobia. The chapter traces the racialization of Jewish identity in fifteenth-century Spain, where suspicion of conversos came to be expressed in terms of blood and the doctrine of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood). It then follows anti-Black racism tied to the Arab enslavement of Black Africans, which grew with Ottoman expansion and with papal bans on selling Christian Eastern Europeans, and the ‘Curse of Ham’ reading that reached Christian Europe through Muslim cultural and commercial contact. Classical sources supported slavery, but its racialization had more varied origins.

  10. 10

    Conclusion

    Summarizes the volume’s main developments, stresses how selective and creative Renaissance uses of classical ideas were, and leads into the early modern period.

Key concepts

vera nobilitas
true nobility: the humanist claim that merit and virtue, not wealth or birth, qualify people to rule
studia humanitatis
the humanist curriculum meant to form virtuous citizens and rulers
signoria and republic
the rival forms of government debated in early fifteenth-century Italy
conciliarism
the movement to limit papal authority through church councils, drawing on Roman law
oikonomia
household management, the frame for humanist thinking about property, wealth, and family
catasto
the Florentine tax assessment, a focus of debate over taxation and inequality
limpieza de sangre
the Spanish doctrine of purity of blood, an early legal form of racial thinking
reason of state and balance of power
early ideas of statecraft and international order

Place in the field

The book is written as the first topically organized survey of Renaissance political thought and an up-to-date synthesis of three decades of scholarship. Earlier general accounts, such as Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1 (1978), the Cambridge Histories of Political Thought edited by J. H. Burns (1988) and by Burns and Mark Goldie (1991), and Janet Coleman’s A History of Political Thought (2000), say little about race, class, gender, Jewish political thought, dialogue with the Ottoman world, or European expansion. It is meant for scholars across political theory, intellectual history, Renaissance studies, classics, religion, law, political economy, gender studies, and the study of race, for undergraduate teaching, and for general readers interested in the history of political ideas.