Chapter 1 focuses on the practice and purpose of biblical scholarship in the Catholic world in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century. It traces the fortunes of three prospective polyglot editions of the Bible in Spain, the Southern Netherlands, and France to examine how the publication of authoritative Roman editions of the Septuagint (1587) and Vulgate (1592) posed new challenges for Catholic scholars and editors of the Bible.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the most significant painting of the Antichrist in Western art – Luca Signorelli’s ‘The Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist’. This painting is located within the story of the Antichrist in the Italian Renaissance, particularly around Girolamo Savonarola. With the Reformation, a new chapter in the life of the Antichrist began. Within Protestantism, the papal Antichrist (both individual and as an institution) became dominant. The views of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox are discussed, along with representatives of the so-called Radical Reformation, both on the Continent and in England. Key to the Protestant reading of the pope or the papacy as the Antichrist was a new interpretation of the book of Revelation that reinforced the judgement that the Antichrist was to be found in the Roman papacy and had been present there since its inception. The chapter analyses the new Protestant interpretation through the commentaries on Revelation by John Bale and John Napier. The chapter also examines the Catholic response to Protestantism by a return to the Antichrist of Adso of Montier-en-Der.

Chapter 2 undertakes to provide a critical narrative of the development and direction of international law as it was characterised by Catholic preoccupations from the Medieval and Early Modern era. Chapter 2 surveys the theological and philosophical contribution to the structure of premodern international law by Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria and Robert Bellarmine. They assisted the Catholic Church at crucial moments in its history and left an enduring legacy, which could broadly be described as a foundation for a Catholic cosmopolitan approach to international law. This process is highlighted and contrasted with the way early-modern international law was constructed. The structure of international law that emerged during the eventful sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to Catholic political and legal thought becoming a minor key in the development of a secularised public international law in the nineteenth century. This distinctively different approach to sovereignty and international order provides an opportunity to examine the peripheral place of religion, particularly Catholicism, in the structure of nineteenth-century international law.

Was Calvin another Luther? Certainly in the early decades of the Reformation it was a common perception among Catholics that the evangelicals were united in their opposition to Roman tradition and hierarchy, and that subtle differentiations were of little consequence when seeking to curtail a movement that challenged the authority of the Catholic Church. Thus it is not rare to find “Lutheran” used as the generic term for evangelicals, a term intended to contrast not with “Catholic” but “Christian.” (The term reciprocates the pejorative “Papist” and the reverence for the pope it implies.) Given the ease with which Catholic opponents grouped all evangelicals together with little concern for points of difference among them, Calvin was indeed seen as another Luther and, like his counterpart in Wittenberg, a dangerous enemy of the church.

Hobbes’s On the Citizen discussed religion and church-state relations less fully than his later Leviathan. In Leviathan, he trenchantly attacked theories which granted the clergy power that was independent from that of the state and its sovereign. In On the Citizen, he expressed his views with greater moderation and circumspection. Modern scholars debate whether Hobbes changed his ideas or just his tone between the two books. This chapter discusses the evidence for and against the claim that On the Citizen put forward relatively conventional views on the relationship between the powers of the state and the church, and that it was only in Leviathan that he abandoned a theory that was close to orthodox Anglicanism, and characteristic of royalists at the time of the English Civil War. The chapter examines what Hobbes said in On the Citizen, and also discusses the ideas of some of his contemporaries. It notes that the book soon encountered criticism for its contentions concerning religion and church-state relations, and especially for granting the sovereign too great power over the church and the clergy. It argues that the theory presented in On the Citizen is not so very distant from that which Hobbes espoused in Leviathan.