Gendering the Renaissance Commonwealth

A pioneering and innovative study that challenges modern assumptions of what constitutes the political and the public in Renaissance thought.

Anna Becker (Author)

9781108487054, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 January 2020

282 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm, 0.53 kg

'Becker has made a strong case for redefining what 'politics' meant in the Renaissance, and her book will offer rich stimulation to anyone interested in Renaissance thought, the reception of the classical tradition, and its multiple transformations on the threshold of political modernity.' Sara Miglietti, Intellectual History Review

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.

Introduction
1. The civic and the domestic in Aristotelian thought
2. Friendship, concord, and Machiavellian subversion
3. Jean Bodin and the politics of the family
4. Inclusions and exclusions
5. Sovereign men and subjugated women: the invention of a tradition
Conclusion: from wives to children, from husbands to fathers.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD]