The expression ‘divine right’ might sound obsolete to modern ears; indeed, it might recall images of an archaic and irrational society. In early modern Europe, things were far from it. As we shall see, divine right represented a systematically argued philosophical theory at the centre of which stood the justification for strong, earthly, power. Divine right is here understood in a specific political sense since it mainly concerns the authority of monarchs (not of bishops and not of republican governors). Such theory argued that God had given power ‘directly and immediately’ to kings, not to the people. Hence the ruler was accountable to none but God; had always to be obeyed; and held unlimited power (consequently, no form of resistance was legitimate). Divine right theory had at its core the idea, and the practice, of the individuality of kingly right, not of people’s individual rights. It expounded a subjective right, not an individual one.

Many of us might imagine that it was the early modern period during which an individual right to property was first conceived as something that we could claim against all other people and against the state itself. The reason we could do so is because such a right was grounded in natural law and therefore preceded the creation of political society. Indeed, the state, according to this account, was created to protect such rights. We would probably have John Locke in mind as the basis for this argument and it is true that such an account of the right to property could be derived from his work. However, Locke’s understanding of property was not typical in the early modern period. Instead, it was far more common for early modern political theorists to see the right to property as something that was established by civil society and therefore completely dependent upon the laws of the state.

Since Richard Tuck published his influential study The Rights of War and Peace in 1999, the works of the Italian civil lawyer and Regius professor of civil law at the University of Oxford, Alberico Gentili (1552-1608), have received much scholarly attention. Tuck presented Gentili as the foremost representative of the ‘humanist’ tradition in the domain of the law of war, and he also attempted to show that the early political writings the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1643) wrote as ‘a major apology for the whole Dutch commercial expansion into the Indies’, were very much in this same tradition. Although Tuck referred in this context mainly to De Indis as well as to the first edition of De jure belli ac pacis of 1625 and conceded that Grotius introduced a different, more substantial account of human sociability in the later editions of his main work, his assessment of Grotius’ natural law theory has triggered numerous critiques and prompted scholars to compare Gentili’s and Grotius’ position on various issues.

Maior dignitas est in sexu virilis - the male sex has more dignity: this aphorism from Justinian’s Digest seems to be the reason why ‘in many parts of our law the condition of women is worse than that of men’, as we can read in a different passage. Affirming the inferior position of women in the law, these passages are often taken as the ‘official, generally consented stance’ of early modern gendered rights discourse. They seem to show that the respective legal conditions of men and women relate to the specific, innate characters of the sexes or, perhaps, their nature. It then might seem to us today that for early modern legal thinkers justifying sexual differentiations of rights was a straightforward undertaking; we might assume that early modern law and rights worked as male instruments of female subjugation that asserted and cemented a ‘natural’ hierarchisation of the sexes, which modernity slowly came to equalise.

Late medieval Christians had constructed a complex method for the discernment of spirits through which mystical encounters could be experienced, scrutinized, and censured. This chapter explores how two famous Counter-Reformation mystics – Teresa of Ávila and Caterina de’ Ricci – successfully articulated their experiences of the divine, setting out their own advice for discernment in the face of growing ecclesiastical hostility.

An introduction to the illustrations accompanying the life of Thomas Becket attributed to Matthew Paris.

Images played a seminal role in constructing the new Counter-Reformation notions of sanctity, and the increasing regulation of sacred art, and of saints’ images in particular, impacted the development of the visual culture of sanctity in a distinct way. This chapter demonstrates that even as artists had to negotiate changing sets of religious and artistic norms in order to create visual proposals for sacred subjects that would also conform to new Tridentine regulations, they also created alternative visual forms for representing aspiring sanctity.

This chapter uses Black confraternities as a case study to show the vital role of such organizations in organizing mutual aid, fostering saintly devotions, and maintaining communal bonds. Confraternities built churches, commissioned art, and took part in public festivals; such activities by Black confraternities also enabled Afrodescendants to navigate social hierarchies and visibly assert their presence in the Catholic world.

The literature generated by the cult of the saints extended well beyond their written lives to encompass plays, poetry, and prose. This chapter explores the vital role played by vernacular print and manuscripts in sustaining English Catholics and their exile communities overseas as one of the many ways literary works on saints could help to construct, foster, and defend early modern Catholic identities.