Political Thought in the French Wars of Religion

‘Nicholls has established beyond doubt the range and sophistication of League thinking, its significance in renewing the scholastic tradition and its contribution to mainstream thinking about the commonwealth and civil society … Nicholls’s clear exegesis of often difficult-to-decipher texts demonstrates with more certainty than hitherto the debt to medieval scholastics in articulating the belief that civil society was unthinkable without religious unity.’ S. Carroll, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History‘This book considers political thought in a way that is both fully embodied (paying attention to argumentation and the ways in which the different parties confront each other) and original (thanks to a selection of little-known texts and a specific way of questioning them), offering us a look into the heart of the debate that ran through sixteenth-century France. Focusing on a well-defined subject (the political thought of the League) at the heart of a long and rich history (from medieval scholasticism to the seventeenth-century dévots), it proves to be extremely stimulating for anyone studying the cultural history of the French Wars of Religion.’ Alexandre Goderniaux, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme‘…the book effectively shows that the French League, so well studied for decades mostly by French historians, in terms of a very sophisticated and more and more deepened social and political history, has also now found an important place within the history of European political thought and the development of Neothomism.’ Cornel Zwierlein, Journal of Modern History

Sophie Nicholls is a College Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Oxford. She specialises in the French wars of religion and her interests range from the intersection between theological and juridical conceptions of politics, to developing conceptions of citizenship and rights in the Early Modern era.