Jean Bodin was a figure of great importance in European intellectual history, known as a jurist, associate of kings and courtiers in sixteenth-century France, and author of influential works in the fields of constitutional and social thought, historical writing, witchcraft, and a great deal else besides. Best known for his contribution to formulating the modern doctrine of sovereignty, Bodin was a scholar of exceptional range, whose works provoked controversy in his own time and have continued to do so down the (...) centuries. Hugh Trevor-Roper described him as 'the Aristotle, the Montesquieu of the sixteenth century, the prophet of comparative history, of political theory, of the philosophy of law, of the quantitative theory of money, and of so much else'. (shrink)

The transmission of ideas in ‘early-modern’ Europe has attracted wide interest in recent decades. In _The Reception of Bodin_ seventeen scholars investigate the jurist-philosopher Jean Bodin’s significance in processes that cross-fertilised European intellectual life from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.