Conclusion

Summary

The conclusion reflects more broadly on the significance of a gendered reading for understanding early modern political thought. It also offers a brief take on the Reformation, a topic most important for early modern politics and marriage. The focus on the Reformation is tied up with one of the most important reflections that this Conclusion offers, namely an engagement with the idea of patriarchal political thought. Earlier scholarship has assumed that ‘patriarchalism’ was the dominant take on the family in early modern political thought. This book however has offered a comprehensive re-examination of this trope and has shown that more important to Renaissance political thought than the father–king analogy was the wife–citizen connection. The Conclusion gives some explanation of the changes that the seventeenth century saw and in which, indeed, fathers became lords, and citizens degraded from a wife-like status to their early modern incarnation as child-like subjects.