Marsilius of Padua and 'the Truth of History'

by George Garnett

Overview

Marsilius of Padua is conventionally seen as a thinker ahead of his time: the first secular political theorist, and the first post-classical thinker to espouse republicanism. He is presented as a scholastic precursor of the republican humanists of the Renaissance. Starting with an examination of the neglected evidence for Marsilius's life, and the contemporary response to his best-known work, the Defensor Pacis, this new study argues that such an interpretation is quite wrong. It shows that Marsilius was not a republican, but an imperialist; and that far from being a secular political theorist, his great work Defensor Pacis is underpinned by a profound Christian understanding of history as a providentially ordained process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191537622
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	06/29/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	592 KB

About the Author

St Hugh's College, Oxford

Table of Contents

1. Introduction2. Providential History from the Fall of Man to the Conversion of Constantitne3. Providential History from the Reign of Constantine4. Christian Providential History5. The History of the Holy Roman Empire6. Canon Law and the Conflict between Emperor and Pope7. The Historian's Use of his Canon Law SourcesBibliographyIndex