The introduction sets out the book’s main arguments and interventions, methodology, and structure. It details how the book applies the concept of ‘active reading’ to classical translation while challenging the idea that translators had a unified political agenda that reflected that of their patrons. It also outlines how the book reinforces the centrality of the concept of counsel and the agency of translators in producing diverse interpretations and applications of ancient Greek and Roman texts. It draws on the concept of the public sphere to conceptualize the shared political import of classical translations. The book’s innovative methodology combines literary-textual, book historical, and historical-contextual approaches and expands the canon to bring out the full range of applications and interventions of early modern translations of the classics while connecting them to larger developments. It ends by explaining the organization of the book according to the main genres of ancient Greek and Roman prose in translation between 1530 and 1580: moral philosophy, history and biography, military manuals, and oratory.

The French imaginary is a Republican imaginary that is premised on political liberty. The red thread across the political thought and the various constitutions of France has been the pursuit of the ideal political regime that would best realise political liberty and the general interest. That approach stands in stark contrast with the civil-liberty-focused Anglo-American liberal tradition, according to which state power ought to be curtailed in order to maximise individual rights. Those two essentially different traditions could rather peacefully coexist in Europe at the Westphalian time of the nation-states. The clash has, however, become inevitable in a time where globalisation and the latter’s regional avatars act as vehicles of Anglo-American liberalism. This chapter introduces the French constitutional imaginary, relying on the tools provided by intellectual history and constitutional law. It contrasts it with the Anglo-American political thought and shows how the former has remained strong despite the erosion caused by the pervasiveness of the latter.

The epilogue provides a summary of the book’s main conclusions, followed by an overview of the key developments in the translation of the classics in the decades after 1580 and their continuities and discontinuities with the period covered by the book. It highlights the translation of more openly oppositional or subversive texts and the publication of complete translations of the major works of ancient Greek and Roman literature, often in folio format with extensive scholarly apparatus, in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It argues that the vernacular literature of the later Elizabethan period drew on translations of the classics produced in the middle years of the sixteenth century not just as linguistic and literary models but also for their topical application of ancient texts to Tudor England and intervention in contemporary political debates that contributed to the development of the public sphere.

Chapter 4 examines the translation of ancient Greek oratory, focusing on Demosthenes and Aeschines. John Christopherson’s Latin manuscript version of Against Leptines (c. 1544) highlights the force of rhetoric in Tudor warfare and politics. Thomas Wilson’s The … orations of Demosthenes (1570) draws on Demosthenes’ call to arms against Philip II of Macedon to warn against his namesake, Philip II of Spain, presenting Demosthenes as a model for Elizabethan counsellors. Wilson also played a key role in the posthumous publication of a Latin translation of the same speeches by Nicholas Carr to continue the campaign against Philip of Spain, though Carr’s translation had its origins in a manuscript that equates oratory with the political liberty and popular rule of ancient Athens and the Roman republic. John Osborne’s English manuscript translations of Demosthenes’s Against Leptines (1582) and Aeschines’s On the Embassy (1583) apply ancient Greek oratory to the political debate of the Elizabethan House of Commons and give a remarkably positive account of Athenian democracy.

By the time of his death, Lincoln had earned substantial recognition as a great president, even admiration as a statesman of outstanding quality. His assassination heightened the sense of loss and mourning Americans and others felt, in tributes, eulogies and sermons.

Chapter 3 focuses on liberty and servitude, and the way in which these conditions – defined in Roman law in terms of the status of individual persons – are predicated of collective bodies described as civitates and populi in Roman political philosophy. Machiavelli’s relationship to this particular conception of liberty has been at the centre of much recent literature on classical, early modern, and contemporary republicanism, but his theory of freedom requires closer scrutiny, not least because of its relationship to a line of thinking about popular self-government which had been used by humanists to articulate a theory of popular sovereignty from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century in Renaissance Florence. This chapter shows how the key concepts of this thesis come from Cicero’s philosophy, which conveys to the humanists an influential account of how to constitute the entity which he calls the populus as the ultimate bearer of public authority. Cicero’s view of ‘the people’ as the master of its own affairs informs his definition of the res publica as res populi – literally, a ‘thing of the people’ – and this chapter shows how it informs the very basis of the classical republican tradition which Machiavelli inherits and reworks.

The scholarly discussion of Kant’s republicanism focuses heavily on his ‘negative’ conception of freedom: independence or not being subject to another master. What has received much less attention is Kant’s ‘positive’ conception of freedom: being subject to one’s own legislation. This chapter argues that Kant’s positive conception of external freedom plays a crucial role in his Doctrine of Right: external freedom in the negative sense (mutual independence) requires and is realized by freedom in the positive sense (joint self-legislation). After first discussing the ‘innate right to freedom’, it is shown that, on Kant’s account, this fundamental right is realized fully only when external freedom is realized in both senses and in all three spheres of public right. Any satisfactory account of Kant’s republican theory must complement the focus on independence with an emphasis on citizenship and joint self-legislation.

As unprecedented as the Declaration was, it was not without intellectual antecedents. The Declaration interacted with and built upon recent expressions of European Enlightenment political philosophy in its focus on “Nature and Nature’s God,” and in its reliance upon the normative principles of “laws of Nature” as well as natural or “unalienable” rights. European Enlightenment political philosophers themselves stood in complex and varied relationships with their ancient and medieval predecessors; sometimes adding to, sometimes transforming, and sometimes rejecting these preceding ideas. The Declaration brilliantly navigates this complex web of intellectual antecedents by treating the ideas of laws of nature, natural rights, the social contract, and republicanism in such a way that the points of tension between their different interpretations are minimized and subsumed within a shared understanding of the importance of nature for political life. In so doing, the Declaration provides an intriguing hint of how the deep fault lines between these political philosophical traditions might ultimately be bridged. The Declaration’s succinct statement of political principles may be viewed as a transformative distillation of a few of its most important European antecedents.

During the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, polycentric political structures based on fragmented forms of sovereignty, the importance of multinuclear urban systems and respect for constitutional, legal and cultural diversity were predominant in the most densely populated European regions, and even within consolidated monarchical systems, such as the Spanish Monarchy. The strong jurisdictional component of these power structures – the result of the existence of numerous corporations, communities, guilds, estates and militias capable of political action and exclusive rights – explains the need to challenge monolithic and homogeneous visions of the state. In this chapter, this vision is replaced by an urban, bottom-up perspective that follows the experience of early modern legal and political theorists as well as citizens. Cities were the primary stage for political action, where assemblies, councils and guilds competed with one another or joined forces to form common spaces of negotiation with sovereigns or other institutions.

Sets out the book’s main themes: Milton’s anticlericalism; his enduring concern to maximize liberty of conscience for heterodox godly lay intellectuals; Milton’s republicanism and its relatively minor place amongst his priorities; his political writing to be understood as partisan and polemical, not as philosophy; “follow the particular”; Milton’s multifarious, unsystematic liberty-talk; “strenuous liberty;” Milton’s tolerationist thought as proceeding from the lower ground; Milton’s poetry and prose not politically at odds, but differing in subject matter, audience, and purposes; unrepentant politics of the late poems. Brief discussion of archive and methods; summary of chapters.