Through its close, critical reading of the political treatises and polemical literature produced in France in the sixteenth century, this book offers a valuable new contribution to the intellectual history of the Early Modern era. Sophie Nicholls analyses the political thought of the theologians and jurists in the Holy League as they pursued their crusade against heresy in the French kingdom, during the wars of religion (1562-1629). Contemporaries portrayed the Leaguers as rebellious anarchists, who harboured dangerously democratic ideas. In contrast, Nicholls demonstrates that the intellectuals in the movement were devoted royalists, who had more in common with their moderate counterparts, the 'politiques'. In paying close attention to the conceptual language of politics in this era, this book shows how jurists and theologians in the League presented visions of sovereignty that subtly replenished medieval ideas of kingship and priesthood, and endeavoured to replace them with a new synthesis of intellectual tradition and political power. In a period when 'the state' was still emerging as an idea, analysing League thought in the context of Jesuit and Second Scholastic sources positions the Leaguers in relation to innovative attempts in European Catholic circles to re-think the nature of belonging to a political community.

Fresh analysis of the political thought of the French Holy League, active during the religious wars, within its intellectual context.

About the Author
Sophie Nicholls is a College Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Oxford. She specialises in the French wars of religion and her interests range from the intersection between theological and juridical conceptions of politics, to developing conceptions of citizenship and rights in the Early Modern era.

Reviews
'Nicholls has established beyond doubt the range and sophistication of League thinking, its significance in renewing the scholastic tradition and its contribution to mainstream thinking about the commonwealth and civil society ... Nicholls's clear exegesis of often difficult-to-decipher texts demonstrates with more certainty than hitherto the debt to medieval scholastics in articulating the belief that civil society was unthinkable without religious unity.' S. Carroll, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History



Book Information
ISBN 9781108840781
Author Sophie Nicholls
Format Hardback
Page Count 340
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 560g
Dimensions(mm) 150mm * 230mm * 20mm