Christian Biet explains that ahead of the restrictions on theatrical representation imposed in the seventeenth century, sixteenth-century theatre was free to stage macabre spectacles of cruelty and bloody horror, convulsive emotions and transgressive acts. Like Bouteille and Karsenti in their chapter in the same book, Biet is careful to locate the theatre he examines during the catastrophically destructive Wars of Religion. While overt depictions of the war were banned in an attempt to avoid sectarianism, playwrights presented schism, chaos, politics of state and abuse perpetrated by the monarchy via the detours of allegory, classical myth or foreign context. In Nicolas Chrétien des Croix’s Les Portugais infortunés (The Unfortunate Portuguese, 1608), for example, the encounter between the Portuguese and the inhabitants of the land they colonize indirectly critiques France’s own colonial politics of expansion and the use of religion to justify terror and abuse overseas. Biet argues that, far from being primitive or archaic, theatre from this period has much to teach us today about the representation in the arts and media of violence and atrocity.

While the political aspect of the traditionalist quest for prescriptive Christianity has been central to the story from the start, this chapter examines, first, the complicated way that religious and political norms are intertwined in American history and dependent on whether the Christian community is in a position of power or not. Second, the chapter examines two aspects of Christian identity that are especially important in understanding contemporary American politics: (1) a global Christian identity that understands Christians as those persecuted by godless secular society, and (2) an antignostic identity that understands Christians as those who wage war against “gnosticism,” a term applicable to whatever conservative Christians are currently combatting in the political sphere.

Sarah Mortimer examines the impact of the Reformation on thinking about the human commonwealth within the Christian temporal and historical scheme of the Fall. From the outset Protestants sought to integrate the civil and the divine, pursuing the ideal of the godly commonwealth, while Catholics would align the commonwealth with natural law, distinct from the divine law which gave the Church its authority. With the hardening of confessional divisions, these differences were accentuated: Protestants appealed directly to Scripture for political guidance, while leading Catholics emphasised that priests and worship were essential to all forms of society. But there were also those such as Jean Bodin who sought to understand politics independently of the Christian story; others, including Francisco Suárez, began to analyse human relationships using the hypothesis of a state of nature with neither sin nor grace. These attempts to stretch and even hypothetically step outside the scheme of the Fall in turn informed the thinking of Hugo Grotius in the first half of the seventeenth century, and the chapter ends with an extended assessment of his reflections on the relation between commonwealth and churches, and his increasing acceptance of diversity in the civil sphere.

Chapter 6 continues an account of the reception of Plutarch’s work in the mid to late sixteenth century in France with reference to the translation work and political reflection of figures such as Georges de Selve (1508–1541) (now famous as one of the figures in Holbein’s famous painting “The Ambassadors”). The latter part of the chapter discusses what is perhaps the best-known moment of Plutarch reception, the French vernacular translations of the Lives (1559–1565) and Moralia (1572) by Jacques Amyot (1513–1593). I discuss how the advent of the Wars of Religion (1562–1598) in France affected the themes through which Plutarch was received and read in Renaissance France, partly through an examination of the para-text of Amyot’s translations in the late sixteenth century. I also explore briefly Jean Bodin’s discussion of ther reliability of Plutarch as a source as noted in his Method for the Easy Comprehension of History.

The idea of Europe first emerged in ancient Greece, featuring in the work of Hippocrates, Herodotus, and Aristotle, among others. The classical myth of Europa describes the abduction of an Asian princess by the king of the Greek gods, and the classical idea of Europe served to distinguish Hellenic culture from an Asian world viewed highly negatively as an enslaved collective ruled by autocrats. In imperial Rome, the idea of Europe served an important geopolitical purpose, underwriting Roman civilization as European. While the rise of Christianity led to the idea of Europe being elided in favor of that of Christendom as opposed to Islam, following the discovery of the New World the idea of Europe became ever more central to reflections on civilization and what was seen as Europe’s civilizing mission beyond its geographical borders. Chapter 1 focuses on the emergence of the idea of Europe in classical antiquity, before considering its role in late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period, following the discovery of the Americas and the new sense of the European that arose at that time, as the idea of Europe and European civilization slowly came to displace that of Christendom.

The first chapter of this book puts League political thought into its immediate historical and publishing context, by way of an extended introduction to the range of material considered in the rest of this book. A distinction is established between demotic, polemical pamphleteering and the scholarly, juridical and theological treatises produced in professional and academic circles, as well as the genres in between, in order to analyse the political thought of the movement in all its registers.

During the Reformation and the Age of Exploration, just war thinkers were forced to reexamine the premises on which the Augustinian tradition had stood, including their understanding of natural law, justice, and sovereignty. This chapter examines three thinkers crucial to that transition: Alberico Gentili, Francisco Suarez, and Hugo Grotius. They are part of the Augustinian tradition, but clearly show signs of subtle departure from their predecessors. Grotius, especially, is a hybrid between the Augustinian past and Westphalian future. They understood themselves to be engaged in a project of continuity: they wanted to salvage and reinterpret the intellectual inheritance of Christendom and reapply it to the changing and fracturing landscape of their day. But the new age inaugurated by the treaties of Westphalia transformed it in subtle but important ways, most prominently by secularizing its discourse and changing its understanding of natural law.

Calvin thus advised the French Reformed communities to await the consequences of King Henry II’s sudden death in a jousting accident several months earlier. French Calvinists (hereafter called Huguenots) could hope and pray that the late king’s policy of repression might change under his successor. With the historians’ gift of hindsight, however, we know that the opposite occurred: Henry II’s death catapulted France into an extended period of political, religious, and social upheaval that encompassed the second half of the sixteenth century. We also know that during the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), Huguenots did not “possess [their] souls in patience.” They suffered greatly, but they also organized and fought against their Catholic opponents, defied the French crown, and ultimately became a protected if vulnerable religious minority in a Catholic kingdom.