Magnus Ryan reverses the standard story of the development of Roman Law: that a law declared universal and eternal by the Emperor Justinian, and accepted as such by the medieval lawyers, was finally ‘historicized’ in the sixteenth century by the French historical school of Humanist jurists. On the contrary, Ryan argues, the understanding of Roman Law held by medieval jurists down to Bartolus was strictly historical, premised on the assumption that the kingdoms and cities of medieval Europe were continuous with the Roman Empire, their authority derived from the same ‘lex regia’ by which the emperors had been granted their authority by the Roman people. The first breach in this assumption of historical continuity appears to be made in the fifteenth century, when similar transfers of authority were identified as taking place independently; and in the sixteenth century Protestant resistance theorists began to claim that original popular authority was a universal principle, exemplified severally in the original, ‘ancient’ constitutions of individual kingdoms (such as France). It was by abandoning the premise of historical continuity with Rome, in other words, that Roman Law was made ‘universal’.

Chapter Three considers central questions in the French political thought of this era, regarding the status of the ‘ancient’ constitution, the power of election and deposition, and the divisive nature of debates about succession laws. It demonstrates the complex nature and range of responses to Hotman’s Francogallia in these contexts, as well as exploring the role of both the Estates General and the often-overlooked Paris parlement in conserving the constitution. It also considers the problem of ‘popular sovereignty’ and its implications for League political thought, establishing that the Leaguers were only interested in the elective, and deposing, powers of the ‘prudent multitude’ and not the wider populace. The double incorporation of the people, as a whole, into the commonwealth and the church is shown to be centrally important in these debates.

Having concentrated in the previous chapter on the foundation of Bodin’s political thought, in this chapter we turn to more specific questions regarding the relationship of politics and oeconomics and their relationship to ethics, and so reconstruct what Bodin was doing with the classical tripartite scheme of active philosophy. We will look closely at the difference between family and state and examine aspects of nature and necessity in Bodin’s thought. Far more than any other thinker, Bodin devoted considerable space to analysing the merits of the natural and the care for daily necessities for the political life. An analysis of Bodin’s understanding of wealth and of the relationship of private and public property leads to an examination of his notion of equality and to his notion of citizenship. Crucial for Bodin’s thought, these topics have not found much attention in scholarship. They are, however, most important for understanding who and what was included in and excluded from Bodin’s Renaissance commonwealth.