Marsilius of Padua and 'the Truth of History'

Download or read book Marsilius of Padua and 'the Truth of History' written by George Garnett and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-06-29 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marsilius of Padua is conventionally seen as a thinker ahead of his time: the first secular political theorist, and the first post-classical thinker to espouse republicanism. He is presented as a scholastic precursor of the republican humanists of the Renaissance. Starting with an examination of the neglected evidence for Marsilius's life, and the contemporary response to his best-known work, the Defensor Pacis, this new study argues that such an interpretation is quite wrong. It shows that Marsilius was not a republican, but an imperialist; and that far from being a secular political theorist, his great work Defensor Pacis is underpinned by a profound Christian understanding of history as a providentially ordained process.