Includes bibliographical references and index

v. 1. The Renaissance.--v.2. The Age of Reformation

VOLUME 1: THE RENAISSANCE -- Part 1: The Origins of the Renaissance -- The ideal of liberty -- Rhetoric and liberty -- Scholasticism and liberty -- Part 2: The Italian Renaissance -- The Florentine Renaissance -- The age of princes -- The survival of Republican values -- Part 3: The Northern Renaissance -- The diffusion of humanist scholarship -- The reception of humanist political thought -- The humanist critique of humanism -- VOLUME 2: THE AGE OF REFORMATION -- Part 1: Absolutism and the Lutheran Reformation -- The principles of Lutheranism -- The forerunners of Lutheranism -- The spread of Lutheranism -- Part 2: Constitutionalism and the Counter Reformation -- The background of constitutionalism -- The revival of Thomism -- The limits of constitutionalism -- Part 3: Calvinism and the theory of Revolution -- The duty to resist -- The context of the Huguenot revolution -- The right to resist

A two-volume study of political thought from the late thirteenth to the end of the sixteenth century, the decisive period of transition from medieval to modern political theory. The work is intended to be both an introduction to the period for students, and a presentation and justification of a particular approach to the interpretation of historical texts. Volume One deals with the Renaissance, Volume Two with the Age of Reformation. Quentin Skinner gives an outline account of all the principal texts of the period, discussing in turn the chief political writings of Dante, Marsiglio, Bartolus, Machiavelli, Erasmus and more, Luther and Calvin, Bodin and the Calvinist revolutionaries. But he also examines a very large number of lesser writers in order to explain the general social and intellectual context in which these leading theorists worked. He thus presents the history not as a procession of 'classic texts' but are more readily intelligible. He traces by this means the gradual emergence of the vocabulary of modern political thought, and in particular the crucial concept of the State. -- Publisher description