Introduction

Summary

An outline of Bodin's career

Jean Bodin (1529/30–1596) was born at Angers into a modestly successful middle-class family. He entered the Carmelite order in 1545 and seemed destined for a career in the Church. But in 1548–49 he obtained release from his vows, apparently on the grounds that he had been too young at the time he professed them. For some time, indeed, he seems to have been moving in other directions. Having gone in 1547 to the Carmelite house in Paris, he managed to pursue studies at the royal Collège de quatre langues, and by the time he left Paris, around 1550, he had acquired a truly formidable humanist education. He was to become one of the foremost polyhistors of his period. By this time he had also become engaged in a private search for religious truth which was to put him under suspicion of heresy at many points in his career. He was probably charged with heresy in 1547, and may have escaped punishment only by recanting. But the evidence for a public conversion to Calvinism in the early 1550s is indecisive and is generally discounted.

Throughout the 1550s, Bodin was a student of law at the University of Toulouse where he also served as a teaching assistant. In the later Renaissance, and in France more than any other place in Europe, academic jurisprudence had become closely linked to humanist erudition, and Bodin was strongly attracted to it.