Uses of Bodin Until the English Civil War

This paper examines how Bodin was received in England until the English Civil War. While historians have paid much attention to the relationship between Bodin's theory of sovereignty and the English Civil War, other aspects of the reception of Bodin have less often been fully explored. However, contemporaries did not always read Bodin with the same focus as either modern historians or Bodin himself. Thus, this study of the early uses of Bodin attempts to pluralize the earlier reception of Bodin in seventeenth-century England. Bodin was read, used, and appropriated for diverse reasons, both within and outside politics. For instance, one less explored aspect of Bodin's works is how they were often engaged as sourcebooks of historical and political examples. While these examples could be used and appropriated without accepting his main ideas, they were not so clearly severed from their source. Among many examples, one most notable case is how contemporaries accepted, rejected, or reproduced his treatment of Protestant Geneva in the richly contested realm of religion. The survey of such uses of Bodin strongly suggests that, while many early modern English men of letters read Bodin's texts directly, many also learned about Bodin through others who mentioned Bodin. These indirect encounters with Bodin, moreover, reveal how contemporaries used authorities to refer to topics they were interested in, reflecting the intellectual culture and the religio-political milieu of the period. As a consequence, such appropriations of Bodin have inversely influenced Bodin's standing in the period as a modern authority. The traces of such secondary characterizations of Bodin are identifiable in the English Civil War period as well. It is questionable whether Bodin was "an icon of the moderate papist; and his political wisdom and moderation." How Bodin was represented and how this affected the fate of his arguments in the period merits further research.