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Political theory professor Stuart Elden explores the history of land ownership and control from the ancient to the modern world in The Birth of Territory. Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territory continues to matter politically, and territorial disputes and arrangements are studied in detail, the concept of territory itself is often neglected today. Where did the idea of exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth’s surface ...
Medieval Sovereignty examines the idea of sovereignty in the Middle Ages and asks if it can be considered a fundamental element of medieval constitutional order. Francesco Maiolo analyzes the writings of Marsilius of Padua (1275/80-1342/43) and Bartolous of Saxoferrato (1314-57) and assesses their relative contributions as early proponents of popular sovereignty. Both are credited with having provided the legal justification for medieval popular government. Maiolo's cogent reconsideration of this primacy is an important addition to current medieval studies.
In The Sleep of Behemoth, Jehangir Yezdi Malegam explores the emergence of conflicting concepts of peace in western Europe during the High Middle Ages. Ever since the early Church, Christian thinkers had conceived of their peace separate from the peace of the world, guarded by the sacraments and shared only grudgingly with powers and principalities. To kingdoms and communities they had allowed attenuated versions of this peace, modes of accommodation and domination that had tranquility as the goal. After 1000, reformers in the papal curia and monks and canons in the intellectual circles of northern France began to reimagine the Church as an engine of true peace, whose task it was eventually ...
This book proposes and defends the practice of urban gardening as an ecologically and socially beneficial, culturally innovative, morally appropriate, ethically uplifting, and politically incisive way for individuals and variously networked collectives to contribute to a successful management of some defining challenges of the Anthropocene – this new epoch in which no earthly place, form, entity, process, or system escapes the reach of human activity – including urban resilience and climate change.
The relationship between rulers and their subjects is always channelled by emotion. This volume explores the specific tones this relationship took on in the Middle Ages, as well as their accordance with a concept of power based ultimately on agreement, an inclination to visualise emotions, a social pedagogy based on fear, and a religious ideology which placed humanity between divine order and divine wrath. It also examines the emotive models used to rule society and deal with conflicts. Together, the contributions in this book demonstrate how our understanding of late medieval society can be enhanced by recognising the emotional strategies present in the game of power and how they were used to build authority. Contributors are: Alexandru Stefan Anca, Attila Bárány, Ulrike Becker, Luciano Gallinari, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Vinni Lucherini, Esther Martí Sentañés, Francesc Massip, Rob Meens, Tamás Olbei, Bernard Ribémont, Flocel Sabaté, and Hans-Joachim Schmidt.
Knighthood and chivalry are commonly associated with courtly aristocracy and military prowess. Instead of focusing on the relationship between chivalry and nobility, Jesús D. Rodríguez-Velasco asks different questions. Does chivalry have anything to do with the emergence of an urban bourgeoisie? If so, how? And in a more general sense, what is the importance of chivalry in inventing and modifying a social class? In Order and Chivalry, Rodríguez-Velasco explores the role of chivalry in the emergence of the middle class in an increasingly urbanized fourteenth-century Castile. The book considers how secular, urban knighthood organizations came to life and created their own rules, which diffe...
An examination of the ways in which Gower's poetry engages with contemporary law and legal questions. It has long been thought that John Gower was probably a lawyer before turning to poetry, and this study reveals his active engagement with contemporary legal debates; they include constitutional questions, jurisdictional issues, private vengeance, jurisprudential concepts (such as equity and the rigor iuris), and aspects of criminal law. The author argues that the Confessio Amantis in particular demonstrates Gower's uncertainty about how to reconcile the ideal of a just law with alternative modes of justice, such as self-help, royal discretion, and divine will. The book also examines the par...
“Phenomenal . . . A must read for us who desire to topple the dictatorship of relativism and culture of death and replace it with the only alternative” (The Imaginative Conservative). Especially concerned with the public nature of religion, historian Glenn W. Olsen—author of Christian Marriage: A Historical Study and On the Road to Emmaus: The Catholic Dialogue with American and Modernity—sets forth an exhaustively researched and persuasive account of how religion has been reshaped in the modern period. The Turn to Transcendence traces both the loss of transcendence and attempts to recover it while making its own proposals. Neither reactionary nor modernist, it questions how—under ...
By taking new steps in updating and revisiting political liberalism, this book reconstructs Rawls's implicit view of constituent power beyond the pages dedicated to it in Political Liberalism and brings that view into conversation with major constitutional theories of the twentieth century.