European Political Thought 1450-1700

The collective, integrated work of fourteen distinguished historians, this book explores political thinking in Europe from the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment, the late fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. If European thinkers of the period seem to have inherited a common vocabulary and a universal set of concepts, their concerns and their expression of those concerns were conditioned in every case by the particular contexts in which they formulated and refined their ideas. The book therefore investigates the very possibility of a European political identity. Can one speak in terms of 'European political thought' in this period, and how was it mediated by what was different, or distinctive, about political thinking across the continent? This is the only fully comprehensive account of European political thought in the early modern period; the first in English that pays due regard to Hungary, to Poland-Lithuania, and to the Scandinavian kingdoms; and the first that encompasses the realm of Eastern Orthodoxy, specifically through the case of Muscovy. It further embraces the political thought of Islam, both a seminal influence upon the political consciousness of what 'Europe' was becoming and a military threat to the rest of the continent, and places all within a geographic rather than a chronological structure.