Gendering the Renaissance Commonwealth

Author : "Anna Becker (Aarhus Universitet, Denmark)"

Hardback

Published : Thursday 2 January 2020

ISBN : 9781108487054

Price : €95.18

Description

This pioneering and innovative study challenges modern assumptions of what constitutes the political and the public in Renaissance thought. Offering gendered readings of a wide array of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century political thinkers, Anna K. Becker argues that the foundations of the modern state were significantly shaped by gendered concerns.

This pioneering and innovative study challenges modern assumptions of what constitutes the political and the public in Renaissance thought. Offering gendered readings of a wide array of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century political thinkers, with a particular focus on the two prime thinkers of the early modern state, Niccolo Machiavelli and Jean Bodin, Anna Becker reconstructs a neglected but important classical tradition in political thought. Exploring how 'the political' was incorporated into a wide array of 'private' or 'apolitical' topics by early modern thinkers, Becker demonstrates how both republican and absolutist thinkers - the two poles which organise early modern political thought - relied on gendered justifications. In doing so, she reveals how the foundations of the modern state were significantly shaped by gendered concerns.

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