From Personal Duties Towards Personal Rights (Mcgill-Queen's Studies in the History of)

Continuing the historical investigation begun in "Consent, Coercion, and Limit", Arthur Monahan examines Western political thought during the period c.1300-1600. Focusing on the concepts of popular consent, representation, limit, and resistance to tyranny as essential features of modern theories of parliamentary democracy, Monahan shows a continuity in use of these concepts across the alleged divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and Reformation. Each of the four parts of the book deals with a specific historical event or phenomenon that provides a focus for the political writings of that period. Part 1 examines the late medieval northern Italian city-state republics and the humanist depiction of their form of polity. Part 2 reviews the legal (principally canonical) and political thought behind the development of a theory of popular consent and limited authority employed to resolve the Great Schism in the Western church. Part 3 describes 16th-century Spanish neo-scholastic political writings and their application to Reformation Europe and Spanish colonial expansion in the New World. This work should be of specific interest to intellectual historians as well as historians of political ideas and political theories and students in history, political science, and religious studies.