A Global Sourcebook in Protestant Political Thought, Volume I 1517–1660

This first volume of the Global Sourcebook in Protestant Political Thought provides a window into the early Protestant world, and the ways in which Protestants wrestled with politics and religion in the wake of the Reformation.

This period saw political authorities and church hierarchies challenged and defended by scholars, clerics, and laypeople alike. The volume engages the full spectrum of Protestants, with reference to theology, geography, ethnicity, historical importance, socio-economic background, and gender. This diversity highlights how Protestants felt pulled towards differing political positions and used several maps to chart their course ? conscience, custom, history, ecclesiastical tradition, and the laws of God, nature, nation, or community. On most important issues, Protestants lined up on opposing sides. Additionally, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox political thought, as well as interactions with Jewish and Muslim texts and thinkers, profoundly influenced different directions taken in the history of Protestant political thought. Even as our own time is fraught with deep disagreement and political polarisation, so too was early modern Europe, and we might read it in the anxieties, uncertainties, hopes, and expectations that the sources vividly express.

This sourcebook will enrich both research and classroom teaching in politics, theology, and history, whether geared towards general political or religious history, or towards more specialised courses on colonialism, warfare, gender, race, or religious diversity.

Part 1:

Introduction

The Editors

Early Modern Biographies as a Window into Political Thought

Bruce Gordon

Natural law and Divine Law

Sarah Mortimer

Resistance and Rebellion

Karie Schultz

The Use of the Sword: Violence, Empire, and Slavery

Matthew Rowley

Toleration

Marietta van der Tol

The Hebrew Bible and Politics

John Coffey

Islam and Protestantism

Mehmet Karabela

Part 2: Sources

Matthew Rowley, FRHistS, is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Fairfield University. His publications include Trump and the Protestant Reaction to Make America Great Again (Routledge, 2020), God, Religious Extremism and Violence (2024), and Godly Violence in the Puritan Atlantic World (2024).

Marietta van der Tol is College lecturer in politics at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. She is Principal Investigator of the Protestant Political Thought project and is author of the book Constitutional Intolerance: The Fashioning of the Other in Europe’s Constitutional Repertoires (2024).