Abstract
Abstract It is widely supposed that human rights are a modern invention, and if rights are defined narrowly enough, I’m sure that illusion can be preserved. Ancient societies, after all, held slaves, regulated prices, persecuted religious nonconformists, subordinated women, criminalized sexual deviance, and typically espoused norms that set the interests of the community ahead of individual needs. Medieval societies were somehow worse. They burned witches -who were, we are assured, simply early feminists - organized religious crusades and holy wars, and locked up some of their brightest people in monastic orders, where they could not pass on a fair share of their genes. It would be an arduous task to sift truth from propaganda in such seasoned charges, but I think we can recognize that just as excesses were perpetrated in the name of liberty during the Enlightenment, so were there conceptual and normative advances in behalf of liberty in the Middle Ages.
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