Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Research Blog

Select tags to filter on

Bodin Conference, St Anne’s College Oxford by Sara Miglietti (CSR Alumna)

On Tuesday 24th June 2014 I took part in the international conference ‘Community, Government and Territoriality in the Political Thought of Jean Bodin’, organised by Dr Sophie Nicholls and Dr Anna Becker at St Anne’s College, Oxford. The conference brought together junior and senior scholars from the UK, Switzerland, Belgium, Finland, and the US to reconsider one of the most important political writers of the French Renaissance in the light of recent scholarly developments. Indeed, 2013 saw the publication of three works which shed new light on Bodin’s thought: the first volume of Mario Turchetti’s bilingual edition of Bodin’s Six livres de la République (Paris, Garnier); a compared edition and Italian translation of Bodin’s Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Pisa, Edizioni della Normale); and Howell Lloyd’s edited volume The Reception of Bodin (published by Brill), which results from a four-year, AHRC-funded project at the University of Hull (http://www2.hull.ac.uk/administration/bodin.aspx). The conference was successful in reassessing Bodin’s thought in the light of these new findings and in setting the agenda for future research in the field. I presented a paper on Bodin’s views on demographic weight and territorial expansion, arguing that his interest in such issues demonstrates the existence within the République of a non-juridical type of political reflection. Other papers discussed Bodin’s stance on superstition (MacPhail), his notion of ‘police’ (Nicholls) and its concrete application to matters such as census and taxation (Berns), his ideas on history-writing (Claussen), his crucial distinction between despotism and tyranny (Turchetti), the tension between the sovereignty principle and the delegation of power to officers (Lee), and the evolution of Bodin’s legal thought (Lindfors). Yannis Evrigenis illustrated a project which he is currently leading at Tufts University, and which aims at making a variorum edition of the République available for online browsing through Perseus (http://sites.tufts.edu/dynamicvariorum/archives/253 ). Howell Lloyd’s concluding remarks brought this day of fecund conversation to a close.

Fri 03 Apr 2020, 13:20 | Tags: Sara Miglietti