This is the first volume to appear in the Oxford History of Political Thought series edited by Mark Bevir. Sarah Mortimer has written a deeply historicist survey of her period, situating a prodigious number of political thinkers, both canonical and obscure, in terms of the manifold debates that touched on politics, broadly conceived, on the threshold of modernity. In so doing, she gets the series off to a very strong start.

The book covers the period from 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses onto the door of Wittenberg cathedral and thereby momentously split the Western Church, to 1625, when Hugo Grotius published his The Laws of War and Peace. The chapters are organized thematically. Mortimer begins by elucidating the tensions between rival imperial and civic discourses of politics in view of, on the one hand, the growing power of Spain, France, and the Ottoman dynasty from early in the sixteenth century, and, on the other, the Renaissance recovery, especially in Italy, of the normative force of the classical theories of polis and res publica. The following chapters are centred on religion and politics: first, the Protestant challenge to settled Catholic theories of Church and state and, second, the unsettling of Catholic political thought in light of the debates about Spanish claims to the newly “discovered” Americas. Evolving concepts of authority, sovereignty, and the limits of political obligation are the foci of the next set of chapters. The final substantive theme to be handled is the nascent political theory of interstate relations and of the laws of war.

Despite the thematic treatment of its subject, however, Mortimer’s survey sustains an argument. This is that although political thought in this period always drew on “ideas current in legal, theological, and classical writing,” these become the ingredients that made for a relatively autonomous discourse of politics by 1625 (p. 7). If there is a narrative arc in the book, it seems to me to go like this: By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the humanist movement had produced new translations of and commentaries on Aristotle’s Politics that recommended the view that “the ultimate aim of human life” was “happiness or flourishing in accordance with nature,” and that politics was a natural activity oriented both toward the common good as well as to what was right, which meant “giving to each person within the city the role best suited to their nature” (p. 25). A new literature, pioneered by the likes of Desiderius Erasmus, advised princes about how to govern justly and for the common good. But some of these same ambitious princes sought to apply pressure to the Pope, assembling learned men to formulate in Church councils broadly Aristotelian arguments that “political power was grounded in nature and natural law rather than in any direct grant from God” and that also “helped to explain why political power was diffused among a number of independent communities rather than united in the [Holy Roman] Empire” (p. 43). Leading Protestant thinkers later rejected the distinction between “natural laws aimed at a temporal end and divine laws aimed at a supernatural end” (p. 69), maintaining instead that magistracy existed for the conservation of order and peace in a postlapsarian world, and further that “the prince was the guardian of the two tables of natural and divine law, and [that] his authority stemmed from his office rather than the community’s consent” (p. 77). Thus was the stage set for Bodin’s definition of sovereignty as “the most high, absolute and perpetuall power” over the commonwealth (p. 180) and of Grotius’s detaching of justice “from questions of merit, desert or virtue, as well as from questions of Christian morality” (p. 264).

Mortimer succeeds, I think, in subtly adding layers to this general narrative. One of these, for instance, concerns the character of political power in increasingly complex and compound political units. Erasmus “begged the most important question,” namely “how to balance the differing and even conflicting interests” of the new territories acquired by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, in Castile and Aragon from 1516 (p. 26). Hence the revival across Europe of a discourse of political flourishing as best guaranteed by “mixed government” (pp. 136–54), against which one reaction was Bodin’s notion of indivisible sovereignty and another was Grotius’s model of the composite polity, according to which “he differentiated between ‘the common Subject of Supreme Power [which] is the State (civitas)’ and the ‘proper subject,’ which could be one person or an assembly, potentially ruling over multiple States” (p. 266).

Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State is, to be sure, a book of great learning, discrimination, and nuance, and to that justice cannot be done in a short review. Nonetheless, it is, in my view, insufficiently argumentative. The reader must work rather too hard to glean such lines of argument as those outlined in the preceding text. Its subject is given an almost wholly nominalist treatment, one writer after another, and I longed for more explicit comparison, as well as a more centripetal analysis, coming back to a thesis, even if this had to be to a thesis about a set of developments that were still underway at any single juncture. The best-established surveys, such as those written by Annabel Brett, Francis Oakley, Quentin Skinner, and Richard Tuck, all have a stronger thread of argumentation running through them.

Relatedly but separately, nearly all the discussion is at the level of ideas. Although Mortimer recognizes that so much of the political theory of her period was motivated by “the impact of social and economic change” and involved “increasingly detailed analyses of structures and institutions” (p. 4), there is too little anchoring of her own account in infrastructural and technological developments. For instance, the mirror-for-princes literature, with which Mortimer’s history commences, only became possible thanks to the invention of the Venetian mirror as a technology of reflection that spurred thinking about the potential that might exist in the actual. Oddly, Mortimer does not mention the “formal principle” of the Reformation, namely the doctrine of sola scriptura; but this revolutionary individualist creed, which entailed that faith was only mediated through the written word and not by priests and sacraments, was only conceivable thanks to the invention of the printing press. Mortimer uses the terms “economy” and “economic” a number of times in her introduction, but the only chapter in which they recur thereafter with any frequency is that on Islamic political thought. It is a significant contribution of the book that it takes a much less Eurocentric perspective on political theory than is usual; but the slightly more sociological approach of the chapter suggests the necessity, especially in a comparative study, of detailing the material underpinnings of political thought, and these are somewhat lacking throughout much of the analysis.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, Mortimer has written an impressive volume. It is lucidly written, concise but comprehensive, well-organized, and remarkably erudite. Everybody will be able to learn something from it, but it will be an excellent resource particularly for graduate students seeking to situate a discrete research project on a map of the variegated terrain of political thinking in a crucial period.