Sarah Mortimer examines the impact of the Reformation on thinking about the human commonwealth within the Christian temporal and historical scheme of the Fall. From the outset Protestants sought to integrate the civil and the divine, pursuing the ideal of the godly commonwealth, while Catholics would align the commonwealth with natural law, distinct from the divine law which gave the Church its authority. With the hardening of confessional divisions, these differences were accentuated: Protestants appealed directly to Scripture for political guidance, while leading Catholics emphasised that priests and worship were essential to all forms of society. But there were also those such as Jean Bodin who sought to understand politics independently of the Christian story; others, including Francisco Suárez, began to analyse human relationships using the hypothesis of a state of nature with neither sin nor grace. These attempts to stretch and even hypothetically step outside the scheme of the Fall in turn informed the thinking of Hugo Grotius in the first half of the seventeenth century, and the chapter ends with an extended assessment of his reflections on the relation between commonwealth and churches, and his increasing acceptance of diversity in the civil sphere.

Does the concept of natural rights have roots, logical and historical, in the concept of natural law? Our answer is, ‘it depends’. By this, we mean that some conceptions across Western history do not in fact allow for the derivation of natural rights in the subjective sense. In contrast, others are conceived such that natural rights follow logically therefrom. Our premise is that talking about ‘natural law’ in the singular – at least in the period from Roman times to sixteenth-century – represents a distortion of on-the-ground realities.

This chapter focuses on the intellectual activities of Aristotelian philosophers within the late-Renaissance and early modern university context. It shows that Scholastic Aristotelianism constituted a varied, dynamic, and long-lasting philosophical tradition rooted in, but not limited to, problems arising from Aristotle’s texts. Late Scholastic solutions did not always pose obstacles to new sciences and matter theories, but also anticipated them. The chapter examines key variants of Aristotelianism in the context of their institutional settings and curricula. This provides an opportunity to re-assess radical Aristotelianism (e.g., Averroism), the late-Scholastic revival (e.g., the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum and Suárez) and Protestant Scholasticism. Developing Charles Schmitt’s thesis that there were many different, even conflicting, Aristotelianisms, the chapter argues that some so-called “anti-Aristotelians,” whom the moderns conscripted as allies to their cause, are better understood as working within a broader Aristotelian framework. Identifying the shared Aristotelian problem space of both more orthodox and controversial philosophers of the period affords a better understanding of both the conflicts themselves and the extensive debts that later developments bore to this tradition.