The Reception of Bodin

In The Reception of Bodin an international and interdisciplinary team of seventeen scholars considers one of the most remarkable figures in European intellectual history, the sixteenth-century jurist and philosopher Jean Bodin, as a ‘prismatic agent’ in the transmission of ideas. The subject is approached in the light of reception theory coupled with critical evaluation of key texts as well as features of Bodin’s own career. Bodin is treated as recipient of knowledge gleaned from multifarious sources, and his readers as receivers responding diversely to his work in various contexts and from various standpoints. The volume provides searching insights both into Bodin’s mental world and into processes that served to cross-fertilise European intellectual life from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Contributors include Ann Blair, Harald E. Braun, Glenn Burgess, Peter Burke, Vittor Ivo Comparato, Marie-Dominique Couzinet, Luc Foisneau, Robert von Friedeburg, Mark Greengrass, Virginia Krause, Johannes Machielsen, Christian Martin, Sara Miglietti, Diego Quaglioni, Jonathan Schüz, Michaela Valente.

Howell A. Lloyd, D.Phil. (Oxford, 1964) is Emeritus Professor of History in the University of Hull, UK. His publications – monographs, edited works and numerous articles, on subjects ranging from Welsh to European history, from social and economic questions to military affairs, state institutions and political ideas – include, as co-editor, European Political Thought, 1450-1700: Religion, Law and Philosophy (Yale UP, 2007).

“This is undoubtedly a major scholarly work, exemplary in many ways, that sheds a unique light on the practice of Bodin as an author and the ways in which many of his ideas were incorporated and appropriated.”
Erik De Bom, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Winter 2015), pp. 1405-1406.

“Il volume si presenta come uno specchio della ricchezza e del vivace eclettismo degli studi sull’opera di Bodin, imprescindibile strumento di indagine e fonte di nuove ipotesi di ricerca”.
Stefano Colavecchia, University of Molise.