Madden explores political theory and governmental organization during one of the richest periods of Spanish history. Along with keen discussions of important landmark doctrines, Madden analyzes the influence of Roman law and the administrative machinery of the king, municipalities and Cortes.

Juan de Mariana's 1599 treatise On the King and the Education of the King has generally been regarded as one of the early stepping stones towards a modern pluralist and democratic thought. Yet when his work is studied in detail and put into the context of Spanish and the wider European politics, and the ongoing dynamics of the Catholic Reformation, it can convincingly be argued that this is a misleading view. Instead, this book presents the case for viewing Mariana as a champion of Christian moral reform, concerned with the transformation of the Spanish monarchy under the leadership of the Chu.

Originally published in 1988, this book explores the history of political liberty. There is an opinion that the conception of Political Liberty, however important it may have been in Athens and Republican Rome, disappeared in the period of the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages, and has only been recovered in the last two centuries. This work is primarily an attempt to set out the continuity of the development of the conception of Political Liberty during the Middle Ages and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - the development, but even more, the continuity of development, for this has been inadequately appreciated in the past.

Part One examines the late medieval northern Italian city-state republics and the humanist depiction of their form of polity. Part Two reviews the legal (principally canonical) and political thought behind the development of a theory of popular consent and limited authority employed to resolve the Great Schism in the Western church. Part Three describes sixteenth-century Spanish neoscholastic political writings and their application to Reformation Europe and Spanish colonial expansion in the New World. Part Four examines the political thought of some of those who responded to new problems in church/state relations caused by the fracturing of medieval Christendom in the West: Luther, Calvin, and other Reformation writers; the Protestant resistance pamphleteers; and Richard Hooker. Featuring an extensive bibliography, From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights will be of specific interest to intellectual historians as well as historians of political ideas and political theories and students in history, political science, and religious studies.

Medieval legal and political thought encompasses the period from approximately 500 CE to 1500 CE. The term “Medieval” refers to the legal and political thought from the time of the late Roman Empire to that of the Renaissance. The legal and political thought of the Middle Ages is overwhelmingly characterized by the increasing role that religion played in influencing politics and law. By the high Middle Ages, we find the great theorists, Averroes, Maimonides, and Aquinas linking law to their respective religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. This book argues that the so-called Dark Ages had very significant ideas about the law, especially how violence is to be contained, which make this early Medieval period anything but “Dark.” It suggests that the Christianization and Islamization of legal and political thought created almost as many problems as solutions to the increasingly diverse times that arose in the middle of the Middle Ages. The book also shows that the late Middle Ages already held many of the most important legal and political ideas of the Renaissance–showing that there was no clear break from the Medieval to the Modern periods of legal and political thought. Of central importance is the way that the development of the idea of conscience made the natural law theories of the Medieval times a robust set of ideas that is still felt quite strongly today.