In this chapter we turn to Bodin’s political, moral, and legal analysis of the conjugal relationship. Bodin thought that the conjugal relationship was the most important of the three governmental relationships in the household. The gender relationship in marriage determined the roots and the nature of sovereignty. The conjugal relationship was central to understanding Bodin’s notion of power, and especially the power of the sovereign. It linked Bodin’s arguments about the relationship of family and commonwealth, which we have discussed earlier, directly to his notion of absolute sovereignty. But, for his theory to be congruent, Bodin needed a wife who was always subjected to her husband, and we shall see that he had to attack the tradition we have studied earlier, thereby considerably bending Roman legal argument and inventing a tradition of female subjection. We will see that contemporaries picked up on this, and we will study a forceful response to Bodin by Antonio Montecatini.

From the world of the Italian city states this chapter now turns to the political thought conceived in the French polity of the late sixteenth century, encountering a Renaissance commonwealth that differs in many ways from those we have seen envisioned in previous chapters. The questions that were raised to make sense of this French commonwealth, however, were similar to those asked by earlier Italian thinkers, and the intellectual context in which these questions were answered was a continuation of the tradition encountered earlier in this book. Our focus in this as well as in the next chapters will be on Jean Bodin’s major work Les Six livres de la République and its context. The chapter shows the importance ofprivate life and the centrality of gender in Bodin’s political thought. It is concerned with the extent to which oeconomics, thinking about the family and about marriage, shaped and marked Bodin’s thought on politics in general and his ideas on the state and sovereignty in particular.