The collective, integrated work of fourteen distinguished historians, this book explores political thinking in Europe from the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment. European thinkers of the period may seem to have inherited a common vocabulary and a set of concepts, yet their concerns and their expression of those concerns were conditioned by the particular contexts in which they formulated and refined their ideas. The book therefore investigates the very possibility of a European political identity and how it was mediated and expressed across the continent. The only fully comprehensive account of European political thought in the early modern period, the book pays due regard to Hungary, Poland-Lithuania, the Scandinavian kingdoms, the realm of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the political thought of Islam.

"The authors demonstrate how the differing understandings of the relationship between the divine and the human underpin the perceptions of the nature of the state. . . . Highly recommended."—Choice * Choice *

Howell A. Lloyd is emeritus professor of history, Glenn Burgess is professor of early modern history, and Simon Hodson is research associate and project manager, all at the University of Hull.