Francis Oakley.Empty Bottles of Gentilism: Kingship and the Divine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (to 1050).Francis Oakley.The Mortgage of the Past: Reshaping the Ancient Political Inheritance (1050–1300).Francis Oakley.The Watershed of Modern Politics: Law, Virtue, Kingship, and Consent (1300–1650).

Abstract

A new history of medieval political thought by a master of the subject is a welcome event. Francis Oakley, a distinguished educator, has himself plowed big furrows in a huge field that he proposes here to survey as a whole. His previous books have dealt with conciliar thought, kingship, law, consent, and much else. Oakley is well qualified to question a prevailing sense of continuity of “political” behavior from the Greeks to the French Revolution. From the start, then sounding repeatedly as a leitmotif, he insists on a deep persistence of archaic sacral kingship from the Middle East as if something hardly less determinative of medieval orders of power than Greco-Roman experience. The result is to recast our perspectives, to see the West not only in worldwide synchronic aspect but also as a scene of diverse currents of self-renewing thought and deed. The books pivot unproblematically on the dates 1050 and 1300, marking off, first, a long antiquity in which kingship was remolded rather than denatured by Christianity; and then, from 1300, a late Middle Ages extending through the Reformation to the disruptive failures of divine right kingship.