ABSTRACT
The medieval world, viewed thus, represented a genuinely new phase in the history of political thought. But how long did it last? The generally accepted assessment among scholars today is that significant strains of medieval thought persisted well beyond, and were not thoroughly repudiated by, the Renaissance and Reformation. Rather, the dividing line between the Latin Middle Ages and modernity, while not entirely irrelevant, is blurry at best. On the one hand, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did witness the appearance of important new principles-such as the sovereign state, institutionalized systems of constitutional limitation on power, and robust conceptions of the political efficacy of the individual-that were largely foreign to medieval European thought. On the other hand, key political themes and languages pioneered before 1400 remained alive and resonant with earlier modern thinkers (Burns and Goldie 1988: 1-4). In sum, it is fruitless to look for some specific moment or event (such as the emergence of
Florentine civic humanism or Martin Luther’s nailing of his famous theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg) as the definitive end of the Middle Ages. Transformation in patterns of political thought was incremental, gradual, and in many ways imperceptible during the early modern period (Nederman 2009).
