Franciscan friars were everywhere in the early modern Catholic world, a world that stretched from the Americas, through Western and Central Europe, to the Middle East and Asia. This global brotherhood was as deeply entangled in the great religious wars that convulsed Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as it was in the Spanish and Portuguese empires. While the political and imperial theories of Dominicans like Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome de Las Casas, who took the theology of Thomas Aquinas as their starting point, are well-known, this has not been the case for Franciscan thinking until now. The Franciscans and their allies built a body of political writings around the theology of John Duns Scotus (1265/6–1308), and this book presents a wide selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotist writings on politics, warfare, and empire in English for the first time. Beginning with Scotus’s own doctrine on the forced baptism of Jews, this collection translates John Mair (1467–1550) on European imperialism and holy war, Alfonso de Castro (1495–1558) on the Schmalkaldic War of the 1540s, Juan Focher (1497–1572) on the war against the Chichimeca Indians of Mexico, and John Punch on the British and Irish Civil Wars of the 1640s and 1650s. The availability of these primary sources for teaching and research will clarify the connection between religion, politics, and imperialism in the early modern world.

This collection of essays seeks to analyse historically these influences, connections, and impact from multiple points of view, such as – but not limited to – the links between war and rebellion, the issues of trust and religious violence, early modern university debates on war and peace, the problems engendered by intolerance and the difficult management of tolerance, the delicate matters of politico-religious accommodation and the implementation of peace in towns and contested territories, the reappraisals and changes in the narratives of military prowess and religious fidelity, the role of women in the religious conflicts in the 'long sixteenth century', the porous boundaries (imagined or real) which existed between 'enemies' in times of war and the issues connected to the cohabitation with the 'Other' in times of peace.

This book explores the endeavors and activities of one of the most prominent early modern Irishmen in exile, the Franciscan Luke Wadding. Born in Ireland, educated in the Iberian Peninsula, Wadding arrived in Rome in 1618, where he would die in 1657. In the "Eternal City," the Franciscan emerged as an outstanding theologian, a learned scholar, a diplomat, and a college founder. This innovative collection of chapters brings together a group of international scholars who provide a ground-breaking analysis of the many cultural, political, and religious facets of Wadding’s life. They illustrate the challenges and changes faced by an Irishman who emerged as one of the most outstanding global figures of the Catholic Reformation. The volume will attract scholars of the early modern period, early modern Catholicism, and Irish emigration.

In this fourth volume of Collected Essays, Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus, and the Franciscan Tradition, Peter Damian Fehlner traces the development of the Franciscan theologies of redemption, co-redemption, and the Immaculate Conception as they both flow from and return to a very concrete spirituality rooted in devotion to the persons of Jesus and Mary. The main protagonists in these studies are the towering figures of Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus. Framed within an ecclesiological and sacramental worldview, shaped by the correlative and markedly Franciscan doctrines of the Absolute Primacy of Jesus and the Immaculate Conception, Fehlner outlines the theological background and rationale for affirming Mary's co-redemptive role in creation and salvation history. In articulating this great vision of the church, Fehlner discloses the Catholic and Franciscan understanding of Tradition and its progressive penetration and integration of doctrinal and devotional development into the life of the church. For Fehlner, Mary's co-redemptive association with her Son and her union in charity with the Holy Spirit provides both the primary instance of and the hermeneutical key for prayerfully receiving and living the mysteries of our salvation.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1861.