The idea of the state of nature was a fundamental way for early modern thinkers to make sense of the emergence of the political.1 With the help of this concept thinkers explained how complex political societies could arise from anarchic multitudes of human beings and how legal frameworks that regulated citizens’ relationships between one another could emerge. Referring to a state of nature, the often conflict-laden relationship between natural law and civil laws was explored, and questions regarding the legitimisation of political power, political rule, and political sovereignty were answered.2 Thomas Hobbes is often identified as, if not exactly having ‘invented’ the concept of the status naturalis, then at least having most influentially imagined it as a condition of war from which the commonwealth was established as a means of escape.3 From Hobbes onwards, the historiographical narrative goes, the ‘classical’, broadly Aristotelian notion that polities were founded upon, and grew organically from, the natural sociability of human beings was replaced by the notion that the political was contracted. The state became an artificial body, defined by its contrast with nature. While it is thus emphasised that seventeenth-century thinkers operated with a new and different concept of how states came into being – which of course then had consequences for how these states were defined – historians of political thought still, tacitly perhaps, assume that one of the most important features of the classical conception of statehood had remained. Politics and the polity, whether organically grown or contracted from fear and necessity, seem to centre on male citizens and/or male subjects. The ‘state’ is seen as a male entity and politics as being constructed in opposition to the social, or the private.4 Therefore, historical enquiries into seventeenth-century philosophy of the state have focused on the relationship among male citizens and the male citizens’ relationships to a government, a sovereign entity, and political power itself. Male–female relationships have been seen as part of the apolitical, private sphere, just as broader questions pertaining to the social dimensions of human beings did not play any role in early modern narratives of the birth and the manifestation of the political.5

This chapter gives an overview of the book and argues that we have to re-think the idea of the grand dichotomy in political thought and reconstruct what it means to be political for early modern thinkers. It engages with the topic of exclusion of women from politics and argues that if we understand that Renaissance thinkers included an array of topics in what constituted the political, we will understand that gender was indeed a formative category in political thought.

Having concentrated in the previous chapter on the foundation of Bodin’s political thought, in this chapter we turn to more specific questions regarding the relationship of politics and oeconomics and their relationship to ethics, and so reconstruct what Bodin was doing with the classical tripartite scheme of active philosophy. We will look closely at the difference between family and state and examine aspects of nature and necessity in Bodin’s thought. Far more than any other thinker, Bodin devoted considerable space to analysing the merits of the natural and the care for daily necessities for the political life. An analysis of Bodin’s understanding of wealth and of the relationship of private and public property leads to an examination of his notion of equality and to his notion of citizenship. Crucial for Bodin’s thought, these topics have not found much attention in scholarship. They are, however, most important for understanding who and what was included in and excluded from Bodin’s Renaissance commonwealth.

Renaissance thinkers affirmed that also in terms of justice and friendship the relationship between the human couple reflected what it was that held together the citizens in the city. This chapter examines the immense importance of thinking about friendship and love for political reflection, and it shows the relationship of civic concord and friendship with the domestic sphere, and particularly with the conjugal relationship. This chapter studies early modern commentaries on Cicero’s De officiis as well as celebrated works of the ‘civic tradition’, namely Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia and Matteo Palmieri’s Della Vita Civile, showing that the learned Aristotelian tradition we have so far studied found its echoes also in the Ciceronian tradition as well as in the volgare. These commentaries and vernacular writings serve as part of the context necessary to understand more fully Niccolò Machiavelli’s thought on family, friendship, and sociability, which has so far not found adequate attention in historical scholarship. Re-examining some of the ways that Machiavelli constructed masculinity and femininity, and setting them into their intellectual context, this chapter aims to show that Machiavelli’s political thought was characterised by a remarkable openness towards the idea of women as dominant agents in the political sphere and by a sense of what we can term, in a postmodern manner, ‘fluidity’ of gender conceptions, in which ‘biology’ was certainly no determining factor. The chapter thus contributes to the question of the nature of Machiavelli’s stato.

In this chapter we turn to Bodin’s political, moral, and legal analysis of the conjugal relationship. Bodin thought that the conjugal relationship was the most important of the three governmental relationships in the household. The gender relationship in marriage determined the roots and the nature of sovereignty. The conjugal relationship was central to understanding Bodin’s notion of power, and especially the power of the sovereign. It linked Bodin’s arguments about the relationship of family and commonwealth, which we have discussed earlier, directly to his notion of absolute sovereignty. But, for his theory to be congruent, Bodin needed a wife who was always subjected to her husband, and we shall see that he had to attack the tradition we have studied earlier, thereby considerably bending Roman legal argument and inventing a tradition of female subjection. We will see that contemporaries picked up on this, and we will study a forceful response to Bodin by Antonio Montecatini.

The conclusion reflects more broadly on the significance of a gendered reading for understanding early modern political thought. It also offers a brief take on the Reformation, a topic most important for early modern politics and marriage. The focus on the Reformation is tied up with one of the most important reflections that this Conclusion offers, namely an engagement with the idea of patriarchal political thought. Earlier scholarship has assumed that ‘patriarchalism’ was the dominant take on the family in early modern political thought. This book however has offered a comprehensive re-examination of this trope and has shown that more important to Renaissance political thought than the father–king analogy was the wife–citizen connection. The Conclusion gives some explanation of the changes that the seventeenth century saw and in which, indeed, fathers became lords, and citizens degraded from a wife-like status to their early modern incarnation as child-like subjects.

This chapter lays the foundation for our inquiry into the gendered notions of early modern politics by following fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentators on Aristotle’s practical philosophy as they attempted to define politics. The chapter shows that Renaissance commentators saw the householdas part of the political sphere, and that they were concerned with ‘the social’ in its many aspects. The chapter particularly examines the political nature of the marriage relationship and its connection to the intellectual notion of citizenship. At the centre of our examination are the Florentine commentators Leonardo Bruni, Donato Acciaiuoli, and Bernardo Segni, but a French and a German commentary, as well as a Swiss one on Cicero, also make their appearance.

From the world of the Italian city states this chapter now turns to the political thought conceived in the French polity of the late sixteenth century, encountering a Renaissance commonwealth that differs in many ways from those we have seen envisioned in previous chapters. The questions that were raised to make sense of this French commonwealth, however, were similar to those asked by earlier Italian thinkers, and the intellectual context in which these questions were answered was a continuation of the tradition encountered earlier in this book. Our focus in this as well as in the next chapters will be on Jean Bodin’s major work Les Six livres de la République and its context. The chapter shows the importance ofprivate life and the centrality of gender in Bodin’s political thought. It is concerned with the extent to which oeconomics, thinking about the family and about marriage, shaped and marked Bodin’s thought on politics in general and his ideas on the state and sovereignty in particular.