Overview

This pioneering and innovative study challenges modern assumptions of what constitutes the political and the public in Renaissance thought. Offering gendered readings of a wide array of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century political thinkers, with a particular focus on the two prime thinkers of the early modern state, Niccolò Machiavelli and Jean Bodin, Anna Becker reconstructs a neglected but important classical tradition in political thought. Exploring how 'the political' was incorporated into a wide array of 'private' or 'apolitical' topics by early modern thinkers, Becker demonstrates how both republican and absolutist thinkers - the two poles which organise early modern political thought - relied on gendered justifications. In doing so, she reveals how the foundations of the modern state were significantly shaped by gendered concerns.

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9781108487054

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Reviews

'Becker offers a convincing argument regarding the perceived political nature of the domestic sphere in the Renaissance.' Yael Manes, Journal of the History of Philosophy

Author Information

Anna Becker is Professor MSO of the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas at Aarhus Universitet, Denmark. She has published widely on topics in early modern political thought and political culture, including political Aristotelianism, oeconomics and gender, and colonial masculinities. She was awarded the Balzan–Skinner Fellowship for Modern Intellectual History 2014/15.

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