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THE JURIDIFICATION OF NATURAL LAW: CHRISTOPH BESOLD'S CLAIM FOR A NATURAL RIGHT TO BELIEVE WHAT ONE WANTS*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2010

ROBERT VON FRIEDEBURG
ROBERT VON FRIEDEBURG*
Affiliation:
Erasmus University Rotterdam
*
History Department, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Postbus 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, Netherlands[email protected]
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Abstract

Luther's early statements, such as that belief is a ‘free work’ and must not be coerced, gained crucial relevance in the juridical debates about the meaning of the Augsburg Peace of Religion in the empire. Christoph Besold was among those transforming the reformers' message into a legal claim of subjects against their governments, based on an alleged natural right to believe what one wants. He thus transferred Luther's claim based on the reformer's trust in the work of the divine word into a juridical claim for subjects against their civil and ecclesiastical magistrates. Besold's argument is thus an example of the important changes in political and religious thought developing within the genre of the German politica during the first half of the seventeenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

I thank Michael Stolleis, Mathias Schmöckel, participants at a Sussex Centre for Intellectual History Seminar, in particular Knud Haakonssen and Ian Hunter, the anonymous reviewer for the Historical Journal and its editor Julian Hoppit for their critical comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.

References

1 Juris naturalis est, conscientiam liberam habere & credere quicquid velis, Christoph Besold, De maiestate in genere (Strasbourg, 1625), part ii: ‘De Ecclesiastica maiestate iure’, p. 132.

2 For a concise summary of his argument against Bodin and in favour of the viability of mixed government see Julian H. Franklin, ‘Sovereignty and the mixed constitution: Bodin and his critics’, in J. H. Burns with M. Goldie, eds., The Cambridge history of political thought, 1450–1700, iii (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 298–328, section iii: ‘Besold and the mixed constitution’, pp. 323–8; for a treatment of Besold's work as part of the genre of the German politica see Robert von Friedeburg and Michael Seidler, ‘The Holy Roman Empire of the German nation’, in Howell Lloyd et al., eds., European political thought, 1450–1700 (New Haven, CT, 2007), pp. 102–75, 146–8; on the reception of Besold in England see Julian H. Franklin, John Locke and the theory of sovereignty (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 66–85; Conal Condren, George Lawson's Politica and the English Republic (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 51–7, 87–90; see in particular for the controversy between Franklin and Condren on the relative importance of Althusius or Besold for Lawson's argument Conal Condren ‘Resistance and sovereignty in Lawson's Politica: an examination of a part of Professor Franklin, his chimera’, Historical Journal, 24 (1981), pp. 673–81; on the reception of Besold with respect to an appreciation of the constitution of the kingdom of England see Johann P. Sommerville, ‘English and European political ideas in the early seventeenth century: revisionism and the case of absolutism’, Journal of British Studies, 35 (1996), pp. 168–94, at p. 174. Among readers using his texts more casually as a reservoir of items of their own argument see for instance Marchamont Nedham, The case of the common-wealth of England stated … (London, 1650), e.g. p. 71.

3 Gizela Hoffmann, ‘Besold’, in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (4th edn, Tübingen, 1998), i, p. 1361, claims that Besold denied that heresy was a political crime and that magistrates should thus not prosecute heresy, but does not specifically refer to the above cited passage. Overviews on Besold are given by Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland, ii (Munich, 1988), pp. 119–22; Horst Dreitzel, ‘Politische Philosophie’, in Helmut Holzey et al., eds., Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie: Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, iv (Basel 2001), pp. 609–866, see pp. 659–63; most detailed biographical information in Barbara Zeller-Lorenz, Christoph Besold (1577–1638) und die Klosterfrage (Tübingen, 1986); Barbara Zeller-Lorenz and Wolfgang Zeller, ‘Christoph Besold’, in Ferdinand Elsner, ed., Lebensbilder zur Geschichte der Tübinger Juristenfakultät (Tübingen, 1977), pp. 9–18.

4 E.g. Gunther, Karl and Ethan, H. Shagan, ‘Protestant radicalism and political thought in the reign of Henry VIII’, Past and Present, 194 (2007), pp. 33–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martin Brecht, ‘ “Ob ein weltlich Oberkait Recht habe, in des Glaubens Sachen mit dem Schwert zu handeln”. Ein unbekanntes Nürnberger Gutachten zur Frage der Toleranz aus dem Jahre 1530’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 60 (1969), pp. 65–75, at pp. 66–71; for a concise summary on arguments for toleration based on assessments of the Augsburg Peace of Religion Horst Dreitzel, ‘Toleranz und Gewissensfreiheit im konfessionellen Zeitalter’, in Dieter Breuer et al., eds., Religion und Religiosität im Zeitalter des Barock, i (Wiesbaden, 1995), pp. 115–28; specifically on Calvin and his attitude to tolerating heretics see Christoph Strohm, ‘Calvin und die religiöse Toleranz’, in Martin Ernst Hirzel et al., eds., 1509 – Johannes Calvin – 2009: Sein Wirken in Kirche und Gesellschaft (Zurich 2008), pp. 219–36. Arguably one of the most spectacular proposals arguing in favour of freedom of conscience for conscience sake originated from Jacob Lampadius, legal representative and adviser to Brunswick-Luneburg, during the negotiations of the Westphalian peace congress: he suggested restricting civil enforcement to the ‘cultus externus’ but leaving the ‘cultus internus’ unregulated, for it belonged entirely to the kingdom of Christ, see Dietrich, Richard, ‘Landeskirchenrecht und Gewissensfreiheit in den Verhandlungen des Westfälischen Friedenskongresses’, Historische Zeitschrift, 196 (1963), pp. 563–83Google Scholar, 564–5, 568–71. Lampadius's argument rested entirely on the sacredness of the relation of God to the believer's conscience, he did not claim any ‘right’ possessed by the individual subject. On the later medieval origins of the argument that consciences must not be forced and that civil and ecclesiastical authorities should limit their jurisdiction to determine the articles of faith and should enforce them only if there are ‘external repercussions’ in the case of not doing so, see M. S. Kempshall, The common good in late medieval political thought (Oxford, 1999), pp. 358 and 360 on Marsilius of Padua. As Kempshall puts it, Marsilius's reservations against the use of force did rest on ‘a Franciscan exposition of the New Testament – “my kingdom is not of this world” (John 18: 6)’. On the debates at Trent, setting the scene for the further debates within the Church of Rome, see Nelson H. Minnich, ‘The priesthood of all believers at the council of Trent’, in idem, Councils of the Catholic Reformation (Aldershot, 2008), xi, pp. 1–21, who reaffirms that the hierarchical nature of the Church of Rome, embedded in the crucial role of a consecrated priesthood for the participation of the laity in the church, made it virtually impossible to grant a right to free conscience against the teachings found by that church. None of that, of course, excluded reasons of prudence and necessity to ‘tolerate’ heretics for some time.

5 See Alastair Duke, Dissident identities in the early modern Low Countries, ed. Judith Pollmann and Andrew Spicer (Aldershot, 2009); Willem Frijhoff, ‘The threshold of toleration: interconfessional conviviality in Holland during the early modern period’, in idem, Embodied belief (Hilversum, 2002), pp. 39–66.

6 Eike Wolgast, ‘Religionsfrieden als politisches Problem der frühen Neuzeit’, Historische Zeitschrift, 282 (2006), pp. 59–96; Mark Greengrass, Governing passions: peace and reform in the French kingdom, 1576–1585 (Oxford, 2007).

7 Susan Doran and Christopher Durston, Princes, pastors and people: the church and religion in England, 1500–1700 (2nd edn, London, 2003), pp. 5, 129–30.

8 William Monter, ‘Heresy executions in Reformation Europe, 1520–1565’, in Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner, eds., Tolerance and intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 48–64; Arnold Angenendt, Toleranz und Gewalt: Das Christentum zwischen Bibel und Schwert (Münster, 2007); Strohm, ‘Calvin’.

9 Aristotle, Politics, vii, 8, 1328, b 2–15; consequently, Martin Honecker, Cura Religionis Magistratus Christiani: Studien zum Kirchenrecht im Luthertum des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1968), pp. 122–3, addressed this commitment to impose unity of religious cult in church and state as one adopting the ‘polis religion’ approach of most classic authors. For similar examples from England insisting on uniformity see Johann P. Sommerville, ‘Conscience, law, and things indifferent: arguments on toleration from the Vestiarian Controversy to Hobbes and Locke’, in Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance, eds., Contexts of conscience in early modern Europe, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 166–79. In the same volume, see also J. Spurr, ‘ “The strongest bond of conscience”: oaths and the limits of toleration in early modern England’, pp. 151–65.

10 Quoted after Norman Jones, The birth of Elizabethan England: England in the 1560s (Oxford, 1993), p. 35. See Doran and Durston, Princes, pastors and people, p. 71. On the emerging context of the perception of a severe challenge to royal authority by the arrival of Jesuit missions in England and the subsequent persecution of Catholics see Lake, Peter and Michael, Questier, ‘Puritans, papists, and the “public sphere” in early modern England: the Edmund Campion affair in context’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000), pp. 587–627CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Sommerville, ‘Conscience, law, and things indifferent’, pp. 168–70.

12 See for example Gianluca Mori, ‘Bayle’, in Wiep van Bunge et al., eds., Dictionary of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch philosophers, i (Bristol, 2003), pp. 61–4.

13 Knud Haakonssen, Natural law and moral philosophy: from Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge 1996), pp. 5–6. A special problem are justifications of resistance against legally established magistrates by way of referring to a natural right to defend oneself and one's family, see Haakonssen, Natural law, p. 5; Robert von Friedeburg, ‘From collective representation to the right of individual defence: Steuart's, JamesIus populi vindicatum and the use of Johannes Althusius’ Politica in Restoration Scotland', History of European Ideas, 24 (1998), pp. 19–42Google Scholar.

14 See Heinz Schilling and Heribert Smolinsky, eds., Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden (Münster 2007), in particular Christoph Strohm, ‘Konfessionsspezifische Zugänge zum Augsburger Religionsfrieden’, pp. 127–56. For overviews Friedeburg and Seidler, ‘Holy Roman Empire’, pp. 102–72, 126–8; Robert von Friedeburg, ‘Church and state in Lutheran lands, 1550–1675’, in Robert Kolb, ed., Lutheran ecclesiastical culture, 1550–1675 (Leiden, 2008), pp. 361–410, at pp. 378–81.

15 Axel Gotthardt, ‘Der Religionsfrieden und das politische System des Reiches’, in Schilling and Smolinsky, eds., Religionsfrieden, pp. 43–58; Strohm, ‘Konfessionsspezifische Zugänge’; on the general lines of Lutheran argument in favour of toleration see Dreitzel, ‘Toleranz’, pp. 115–28.

16 Arno Strohmeyer, Konfessionskonflikt und Herrschaftsordnung: Widerstandsrecht bei den österreichischen Ständen (1550–1650) (Mainz, 2006); Regina Pörtner, The Counter-Reformation in central Europe: Styria, 1580–1630 (Oxford, 2001).

17 Bodo Nischan, Prince, people, and confession: the Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, PA, 1994).

18 Andreas Ernstberger, De autonomia, das ist von Freystellung mehrerlay Religion und Glauben (Munich, 1586).

19 Martin Heckel, ‘Autonomia und Pacis Composito: Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden in der Deutung der Gegenreformation’ (1959), in idem, Gesammelte Schriften: Staat-Kirche-Recht-Geschichte, ed. Klaus Schlaich (4 vols., Tübingen, 1989), i, pp. 1–82, at p. 8; Strohm, ‘Konfessionsspezifische Zugänge’, on Ernstberger, pp. 136–9.

20 Friedeburg and Seidler, ‘Holy Roman Empire’, pp. 141–6.

21 Ernstberger, De autonomia, p. 1.

22 Ibid., part 20, pp. 20, 33, 58.

23 See now Greengrass, Governing passions.

24 Harro Höpfl, ed., Luther and Calvin on secular authority (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 25–6; see also in Martin Luther, Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Karin Bornkamm and Gerhard Ebeling (Frankfurt, 1982), iv, pp. 36–84, at pp. 63, 38–9. Martin Brecht, Martin Luther (Stuttgart, 1986), ii, p. 121: ‘In ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte waren diese Gedanken [‘Von Weltlicher Obrigkeit’] ein wichtiger Beitrag zur Gewissensfreiheit'. See most recently John Witte, Law and Protestantism: the legal teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge, 2002); Strohm, ‘Calvin’, pp. 223–4.

25 Martin Heckel, ‘Staat und Kirche nach den Lehren der evangelischen Juristen Deutschlands in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, 73 Kan. Abteilung 42 (1956), pp. 117–247, and 74 Kan. Abteilung 43 (1957), pp. 202–308; the locus classicus on this development and on Johann Gerhard remains Honecker, Cura Religionis.

26 Johann Gerhard, Loci theologici, ed. F. Frank (Leipzig, 1885), no. 210, p. 372; no. 212, p. 373. Honecker, Cura Religionis, pp. 122–3, on the argument in favour of unity of church and state inspired by the classical polis. For a similar reasoning see Hermann Conring's defence of the rights of civil magistrates over the church in his additions to his 1671 edition of Jacob Lampadius's arguments, where Conring argued that God had given authority over the church to civil magistrates, that the kings of the Jews had enforced the Mosaic Law, and all the Christian kings and emperors had been responsible for the enforcement of the apostolic belief, see Dietrich, ‘Landeskirchenrecht’, p. 566.

27 See Zeller-Lorenz, Klosterfrage, on his biography.

28 In Christoph Besold, Opera politicorum... (Strasbourg, 1626), pp. 7, 8, 3, 4.

29 See for instance Johannes Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Walther von Dyck and Max Caspar (20 vols., Munich, 1937–90), xvii, no. 809, p. 283; xviii, no. 940. See also Robert von Friedeburg, ‘Between Scylla and Charybdis? Evidence on the conversion of Christoph Besold from his letters and his legal and political thought’, in Henk van Nellen et al., eds., Tussen Scylla en Charybdis: Geleerde Briefschrijvers op het Raakvlat vanWetenschap, Politiek en Religie (1500–1700), forthcoming.

30 See for these biographical details Zeller-Lorenz, Klosterfrage; in particular on his conversion Matthias Pohlig, ‘Gelehrter Frömmigkeitsstil und das Problem der Konfessionswahl: Christoph Besold (1577–1638) und seine Konversion zum Katholizismus’, in Ute Lotz-Heumann, Jan-Friedrich Mißfelder, and Matthias Pohlig, eds., Konversion und Konfession in der Frühen Neuzeit (Gütersloh, 2007), pp. 323–52.

31 On his critique of ‘ratio status’ arguments in his inaugural address when becoming rector, inconsistent with his 1625 use of ratio status arguments to support his defence of toleration, see Martin Brecht, ‘Christoph Besold: Versuche und Ansätze einer Deutung’, Pietismus und Neuzeit, 26 (2000), pp. 11–28, at p. 18; for the later revision see in particular Christoph Besold, Synopsis politicae doctrinae (Amsterdam, 1643), now referring to and supporting Bellarmine. This book has been edited by Laetitia Boehm, Christoph Besold: Synopse der Politik (Frankfurt, 2000).

32 Besold, ‘De Ecclesiastica maiestate iure’, p. 128.

33 See above and also Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, xviii, no. 1030, with Besold's warning to Kepler to be careful with making public any detail of his religious persuasions; see also Brecht, ‘Besold’, p. 22, on his ambivalent attitude.

34 Besold, ‘De Ecclesiastica maiestate iure’, p. 130: ‘Es sollen sich alle Christen umb das Reich Christi und sein Gerechtigkeit annehmen, deshalb niemand mit Wahrheit sagen kann, dass die Obrigkeit, sofern sie Christen genannt und sein will, sich des Christlichen thuns nicht sole unterfahren...Doch soll kein Oberer seine Untertanen weder zu seinem Gottesdienst noch christlichen Glauben mit Gewalt zwingen oder mit dem Schwert und Blutvergiessen/auch die/so nicht seins Glaubens/weder vertreiben noch tödten/wie im Papstthum geschieht/denn solches dem Sanftmütigen und freywilligen Geist Christi entgegen und zuwider ist.’

35 Besold, ‘Ecclesiastica maiestate iure’, p. 130.

36 Jochen Birkenmeier, Via regia: Religiöse Haltung und Konfessionspolitik Kaiser Maximilians II. (1572–1576) (Berlin, 2008), pp. 92–6.

37 Dietrich, ‘Landeskirchenrecht’, p. 579, on the Lutheran position visible right into the 1640s to extend the possibility for Lutheran worship in Catholic jurisdiction beyond private to public worship without granting reciprocal rights to the Catholics or denying the need to suppress heresy.

38 Besold, ‘De Ecclesiastica maiestate iure’, p. 132.

39 Ibid., p. 134.

40 Strohmeyer, Widerstandsrecht, pp. 319–22.

41 Besold, ‘De Ecclesiastica maiestate iure’, pp. 134–5.

42 Ibid., p. 141. The issue of a right to resist unlawful orders of a prince was treated in conjunction with his general deliberation on the constitutional constraints of any lawful government, see below.

43 Ibid., p. 142.

44 On Besold's position on the ius reformandi see Bernd Christian Schneider, Ius reformandi: Die Entwicklung eines Staatskirchenrechts von seinen Anfängen bis zum Ende des Alten Reiches (Tübingen, 2001), pp. 317–18: Besold argued that most of the rights of majesty over the church now exercised by civil magistrates (in Protestant territories) had ‘devolved’ from episcopal rights (theory of ‘devolution’) that themselves had been ursurped by bishops in medieval times. But neither he nor others could possibly argue that bishops, Catholic or Lutheran, had ever had the option to choose between different confessions, one of which had necessarily to be heretical. Thus he could not but assume that the ius reformandi was a right of civil magistrates over the church that had not ‘devolved’ to them together with other hitherto episcopal rights.

45 Besold, De maiestate, c. i, p. 5; and pp. 45–55. See Franklin, ‘Sovereignty and the mixed constitution’, pp. 323–8.

46 Besold, De maiestate, p. 67: ‘ergo naturae jus, hoc est rationem rectam observate tenetur’, ‘lex imperatorem non est supra legem dei’. Besold distinguished as others the ius naturae primaevum (self-defence, procreation) and the ius naturae secundarium as rational law of the people, both known to men independent of revelation. For a debate on this distinction see Annabel Brett, Liberty, right and nature: individual rights in later scholastic thought (Cambridge, 1997), p. 181.

47 Besold, De maiestate, c. i, p. 6.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., p. 9.

51 Ibid.

52 See in particular chapters ii and iv.

53 See King James VI and I, Selected writings, ed. Neil Rhodes et al. (Ashgate, 2003), pp. 259–79, 262–6.

54 Besold, De maiestate, ch. viii, p. 76. The issue of resistance against tyranny is treated in chapter vii in conjunction with an exploration of the laws of the land, see ibid., p. 60. Besold also cites works on the laws of fiefs allowing vassals to defend their fiefs against illegal infringements of their lords, in particular Heinrich Rosenthal, Tractatus et synopsis totius iuris feudalis (Cologne, 1610), ch. x, concl. 20, pp. 58–60, concl. 33, pp. 125–8. On the remarkable support of Lutheran legal scholars for territorial estates see Friedeburg, ‘Church and state’, pp. 398–405, on Rosenthal p. 404. On the issue of estate resistance to princes within the empire during the 1620s to 1660s see von Friedeburg, Robert, ‘The making of patriots: love of fatherland and negotiating monarchy in seventeenth-century Germany’, Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), pp. 881–916CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is important to stress that none of these arguments were intrinsically anti-monarchical; Rosenthal for instance defended the princes' right to taxation, see Rainer Walz, Stände und frühmoderner Staat (Neustadt an der Aisch, 1982), p. 116.

55 For example Christoph Besold, Discursus de aerario publico (Tübingen, 1619), question ii on the nature of the jus superioritatis, p. 89.

56 Robert von Friedeburg, Self defence and religious strife in early modern Europe: England and Germany, 1530–1680 (Ashgate, 2002), pp. 61–3, and the literature cited there.

57 Karl Heinz Ilting, ‘Naturrecht’, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart, 1978), iv, pp. 245–313, 264–5: ‘Gegenwart des göttlichen Gesetzes in der endlichen Vernunft’.

58 See Gerald Hartung, ‘Althusius’ Verträglichkeit im Kontext spätmittelalterlicher Jurisprudenz und Scholastik', in Frederick S. Carney et al., eds., Jurisprudenz, Politische Theorie und Politische Theologie (Berlin, 2003), pp. 287–304, at p. 290.

59 Mathias Schmöckel, Auf der Suche nach der Verlorenen Ordnung (Bonn, 2005), p. 218; Kempshall, Common good, pp. 124, 251.

60 Ilting, ‘Naturrecht’, pp. 264–5, 275.

61 Christoph Strohm, Calvinismus und Recht: Weltanschaulich-konfessionelle Aspekte im Werk reformierter Juristen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen, 2008); idem, ‘Die Voraussetzungen reformatorischer Naturrechtslehre in der humanistischen Jurisprudenz’, Zeitschrift der Savigny Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, kanonistische Abteilung, 86 (2000), pp. 398–413.

62 Corpus iuris civilis, institutiones, liber I, tit. II: ius naturale est quod natura omnia animalia docuit.

63 Quotation Brett, Liberty, pp. 175, 180. Both Ferdinando Vasquez, Controversiae illustres (1564), and Luis Molina, De justitia et jure, were quoted by contemporary jurists such as Althusius and Besold, in Besold for instance in his De maiestate, p. 47. On Althusius's references to Vasquez see the still controversial Ernst Reibstein, Johannes Althusius als Fortsetzer der Schule von Salamanca (Karlsruhe, 1955); the most recent evaluation, insisting on the similarity of all sixteenth-century conceptions of the law of nature is Merio Scattola, ‘Johannes Althusius und das Naturrecht des 16. Jahrhunderts’, in Carney et al., eds., Jurisprudenz, pp. 371–98, 388–9. On the Spanish scholars themselves see Anthony Pagden, ‘Dispossessing the barbarians: the language of Spanish Thomism and the debate over the property rights of the American Indians’, in idem, ed., The languages of political theory in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 79–98; Harald E. Braun, Juan Mariana and early modern Spanish political thought (Aldershot, 2007), and Brett, Liberty. In 1625, Besold could not yet have known Grotius's major work.

64 Hugo Donellus, Commentarii de iure civili libri viginti octo (Frankfurt, 1595), here used Antwerp 1642, lib. i, ch. i, p. 4: ‘vita, corporis incolumitas, libertas, existimatio’; Manfred Herrmann, Der Schutz der Persönlichkeit in der Rechtslehre des 16.- 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1968), pp. 20–1.

65 Donellus, Commentarii, lib. i ch. iii, pp. 18, 19; see also ibid., lib. ii, ch. vii, p. 225: ‘Ad privatorum utilitatem recta pertinere ius intelligitur, quod privatis et singulis, quae suum est, tribuit.’ See Herrmann, Schutz, pp. 22–3.

66 Johannes Althusius, Dicaeologica (Herborn, 1617), lib. i, pars altera, ch. xxv, pp. 95–9.

67 Herrmann, Schutz, p. 25, stresses that Donellus, Commentarii, lib. xv, ch. xxv, ‘De iniuriis’, insists on the protection of these rights but in no way specifies how this protection is going to be implemented.

68 Insofar, we cannot address these rights as modern fundamental rights. See Christoph Link, ‘Naturrechtliche Grundlagen des Grundrechtsdenkens in der deutschen Staatsrechtslehre des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Günter Birtsch, ed., Grund- und Freiheitsrechte von der ständischen zur spätbürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Göttingen, 1987), pp. 215–33, at p. 217.

69 See on Althusius Lucia Bianchi, Dove non arriva la legge: dottrina della censura nella prima eta moderna (Bologna, 2005), pp. 243–92.

70 For example, on England and the Great Tew Group around Falkland see Doran and Durston, Princes, pastors and people, p. 33.

71 Anthony J. La Vopa, Grace, talent and merit: poor students, clerical careers, and professional ideology in eighteenth-century Germany (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 266–7.

72 Kempshall, Common good, p. 124; Haakonssen, Natural law, pp. 5–7.

73 Ian Hunter, The secularisation of the confessional state: the political thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge, 2007); Heinrich de Wall, ‘Staat und Staatskirche als Garanten der Toleranz’, in Heiner Lück, ed., Christian Thomasius (1655–1728): Wegbereiter moderner Rechtskultur und Juristenausbildung (Hildesheim, 2006), pp. 117–33; Christoph Link, Die Grundlagen der Kirchenverfassung im lutherischen Konfessionalismus des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1966), pp. 32–4.

74 Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), p. 398.

75 Walter Travers, A harmony of confessions of the Christian and reformed churches (London, 1643), p. 254, quoted after Stephen Brachlow, The communion of the saints (Oxford, 1988), p. 81.

76 William Ames, The marrow of sacred divinity (London, 1643), p. 147. See on this Brachlow, Communion, p. 89.

77 Henry Jacob, An attestation of many learned, godly and famous divines (Middelburg, 1619), pp. 47, 52; for the reference on Luther, see Brachlow, Communion, p. 186.

78 Paul Baynes, The diocesans triall (London, 1621), p. 83.

79 See for instance Constantin Fasolt, ‘Author and authenticity in Conring's “New discourse on the Roman-German emperor”: a seventeenth century case study’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54 (2001), pp. 188–220.

80 Martin Heckel, ‘Politischer Friede und geistliche Freiheit im Ringen um die Wahrheit’, Historische Zeitschrift, 282 (2006), pp. 391–425, at pp. 401–4, on the insistence on that unity.

81 For Besold's own reversal of his earlier views see Besold, Synopsis politicae doctrinae, pp. 7–29.

82 Leonard Krieger, The German idea of freedom: history of a political tradition (New Haven, CT, 1957); see for more detail on the strong German connection of enlightenment, territorial absolutism, and the uses of the new secular natural law: Reibstein, Ernst, ‘Deutsche Grotius Kommentare bis zu Christian Wolff’, Zeitschrift für ausländisches und öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht, 15 (1953/4), pp. 76–102Google Scholar; Ian Hunter, ‘The love of a sage or the command of a superior: the natural law doctrines of Leibniz and Pufendorf’, in T. J. Hochstrasser and P. Schröder, eds., Early modern natural law theories (Dordrecht, 2003), pp. 169–94; Thomas Ahnert, ‘The prince and the church in the thought of Christian Thomasius’, in Ian Hunter and David Saunders, eds., Natural law and civil sovereignty in early modern political thought (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 91–106.