Political Theology In Medieval And Early Modern Europe

This book aims to provide new historical and theoretical perspectives on political theology with an interdisciplinary approach, from political philosophy and theology to art and history. After a comprehensive introduction and three introductory chapters on both the theory and the concept of "political theology" (based on the works of Schmitt, de Lubac, and Kantorowicz), this volume explores the transferences between the temporal and the spiritual experimented on the past. It interprets some historical events (medieval crusades, royal wisdom, and early modern idea of tolerance), examines some philosophical and theological narratives (John of Paris, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle, Leibniz, Montesquieu, Toqueville), and deciphers some rites (royal coronations) and representations (the Holy Crown, royal banquets, royal coats of arms).

This book is composed of a series of studies in the history of political thought from late antiquity to the early-eighteenth century. They range broadly across theories of kingship, political theology, constitutional ideas, natural-law thinking, and consent theory.

The volume explores the relationship between religion and violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Early modern period, involving European and Japanese scholars. It investigates the ideological foundations of the relationship between violence and religion and their development in a varied corpus of sources (political and theological treatises, correspondence of missionaries, pamphlets, and images).

Originally published in 1957, this classic work has guided generations of scholars through the arcane mysteries of medieval political theology. Throughout history, the notion of two bodies has permitted the postmortem continuity of monarch and monarchy, as epitomized by the statement, “The king is dead. Long live the king.” In The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz traces the historical dilemma posed by the “King’s two bodies”—the body natural and the body politic—back to the Middle Ages. The king’s natural body has physical attributes, suffers, and dies, as do all humans; however the king’s spiritual body transcends the earth and serves as a symbol of his office as majesty with the divine right to rule. Bringing together liturgical works, images, and polemical material, Kantorowicz demonstrates how early modern Western monarchies gradually began to develop a political theology. Featuring a new introduction and preface, The King’s Two Bodies is a subtle history of how commonwealths developed symbolic means for establishing their sovereignty and, with such means, began to establish early forms of the nation-state.

Political theology is a distinctly modern problem, one that takes shape in some of the most important theoretical writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But its origins stem from the early modern period, in medieval iconographies of sacred kinship and the critique of traditional sovereignty mounted by Hobbes and Spinoza. In this book, Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton assemble established and emerging scholars in early modern studies to examine the role played by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and thought in modern conceptions of political theology. Political Theology and Early Modernity explores texts by Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Milton, and others that have served as points of departure for such thinkers as Schmitt, Strauss, Benjamin, and Arendt. Written from a spectrum of positions ranging from renewed defenses of secularism to attempts to reconceive the religious character of collective life and literary experience, these essays probe moments of productive conflict, disavowal, and entanglement in politics and religion as they pass between early modern and modern scenes of thought. This stimulating collection is the first to answer not only how Renaissance and baroque literature help explain the persistence of political theology in modernity and postmodernity, but also how the reemergence of political theology as an intellectual and political problem deepens our understanding of the early modern period.--Publisher description.

The concept of heresy is deeply rooted in Christian European culture. The palpable increase in incidences of heresy in the Middle Ages may be said to directly relate to the Christianity's attempts to define orthodoxy and establish conformity at its centre, resulting in the sometimes forceful elimination of Christian sects. In the transition from medieval to early modern times, however, the perception of heresy underwent a profound transformation, ultimately leading to its decriminalization and the emergence of a pluralistic religious outlook. The essays in this volume offer readers a unique insight into this little-understood cultural shift. Half of the chapters investigate the manner in which the church and its attendant civil authorities defined and proscribed heresy, whilst the other half focus on the means by which early modern writers sought to supersede such definition and proscription. The result of these investigations is a multifaceted historical account of the construction and serial reconstruction of one of the key categories of European theological, juristic and political thought. The contributors explore the role of nationalism and linguistic identity in constructions of heresy, its analogies with treason and madness, the role of class and status in the responses to heresy. In doing so they provide fascinating insights into the roots of the historicization of heresy and the role of this historicization in the emergence of religious pluralism.

This volume of essays by Heinz Schilling represents his three main fields of interest in early modern European history. The first section of the book, entitled 'Urban Society and Reformation', deals with urban society in northern Germany and the Netherlands from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The author discusses social structure and changes, the problems of religion and mentality as well as political culture and thinking. The second section, 'confessionalization and Second Reformation', treats the paradigm 'Confessionalization', which denotes a fundamental process of social change within Old European society during the second half of the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. The third section, 'The Netherlands — the Pioneer Society of Early Modern Europe', deals with the Northern Netherlands as a model for early modern modernization and as a successful republican and 'bourgeois' alternative to the aristocratic Old European society. The essays collected in this book were originally written in German and published over the last fifteen years. The articles have been revised and the notes have been updated. This volume gives a broader English-speaking audience the possibility to read Heinz Schilling's research. It also provides a concise collection of the author's writings for those readers who are already familiar with his studies.

Innovative collection about the interaction of liturgy and politics in high medieval Europe.00Although as long ago as the 1940s Ernst H. Kantorowicz exhorted medievalists to make greater use of liturgical sources, historians largely continued to ignore the "magic thicket of prayers, benedictions, and ecclesiastical rites" that comprise the liturgy. Instead they left liturgical sources to specialists interested in the development of individual rites through time. This volume, inspired by Kantorowicz?s insights, builds on the work of a new generation of scholars, who see liturgical sources as integral to understanding medieval politics and society. The individual essays focus on different polities and regions of medieval Christiana Europe, but all concentrate on the high Middle Ages, a period in which the importance of liturgy to political cultures has traditionally been seen as being in decline. Together the essays demonstrate how a careful reading of liturgical sources can shed new light on political cultures and practices, how liturgical rituals shaped politics and how political realities influenced liturgical ceremonial. They demonstrate the interrelationship between liturgical scholarship and political theory, and challenge the paradigm of the desacralization of kingship and politics in this period.