A reinterpretation of Sarpi's life as expressing a carefully thought out hostility to doctrinal religion.

This book is an intellectual biography of the Venetian historian and theologian Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623). It analyses Sarpi's natural philosophy, religious ideas and political thought. Kainulainen argues that Sarpi was influenced by Neostoicism, Neoepicureanism and the sixteenth-century scientific revolution; that Sarpi was a fideist and Christian mortalist who, while critical of the contemporary Church of Rome, admired the purity of the early church. Focusing on Sarpi’s separation between church and state, his use of absolutism, divine right of kings and reason of state, the book offers a fresh perspective on medieval and reformation traditions. It will be of interest to those interested in early-modern intellectual history and the interplay between science, religion and politics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political discourse.

The early transition from Catholicism to Protestantism was a complicated journey for England, as individuals sorted out their spiritual beliefs, chose their political allegiances, and confronted an array of religious differences that had sprung forth in their society since the reign of Henry VIII. Inner anxieties often translated into outward violence. Amidst this turmoil the poet and Protestant preacher John Donne (1572-1631) emerged as a central figure, one who encouraged peace among Christians. Raised a Catholic but ordained in 1615 as an Anglican clergyman, Donne publicly identified himself with Protestantism, and yet scholars have long questioned his theological orientation. Drawing upon recent scholarship in church history, the authors of this collection reconsider Donne's relationship to Protestantism and clearly demonstrate the political and theological impact of the Reformation on his life and writings. The collection includes thirteen essays that together place Donne broadly in the context of English and European traditions and explore his divine poetry, his prose work, the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and his sermons. It becomes clear that in adopting the values of the Reformation, Donne does not completely reject everything from his Catholic background. Rather, the clash of religion erupts in his work in both moving and disconcerting ways. This collection offers a fresh understanding of Donne's hard-won irenicism, which he achieved at great personal and professional risk.

Venice Reconsidered offers a dynamic portrait of Venice from the establishment of the Republic at the end of the thirteenth century to its fall to Napoleon in 1797. In contrast to earlier efforts to categorize Venice's politics as strictly republican and its society as rigidly tripartite and hierarchical, the scholars in this volume present a more fluid and complex interpretation of Venetian culture. Drawing on a variety of disciplines—history, art history, and musicology—these essays present innovative variants of the myth of Venice—that nearly inexhaustible repertoire of stories Venetians told about themselves.

Was the emperor as sovereign allowed to seize the property of his subjects? Was this handled differently in late medieval Roman law and in the practice and theory of zabt in Mughal India? How is political sovereignty relating to the church ́s powers and to trade? How about maritime sovereignty after Grotius? How was the East India Company as a ́corporation ́ interacting with an Indian Nawab? How was the Shogunate and the emperor negotiating ́sovereignty ́ in early modern Japan? The volume addresses such questions through thoroughly researched historical case studies, covering the disciplines of History, Political Sciences, and Law. Contributors include: Kenneth Pennington, Fabrice Micallef, Philippe Denis, Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi, Joshua Freed, David Dyzenhaus, Michael P. Breen, Daniel Lee, Andrew Fitzmaurice and Kajo Kubala, Nicholas Abbott, Tiraana Bains, Cornel Zwierlein, Mark Ravina.

The period between the late Renaissance and the early Enlightenment has long been regarded as the zenith of the "republic of letters", a pan-European community of like-minded scholars and intellectuals who fostered critical approaches to the study of the Bible and other ancient texts, while renouncing the brutal religio-political disputes that were tearing their continent apart at the same time. Criticism and Confession offers an unprecedentedly comprehensive challenge to this account. Throughout this period, all forms of biblical scholarship were intended to contribute to theological debates, rather than defusing or transcending them, and meaningful collaboration between scholars of different confessions was an exception, rather than the norm. "Neutrality" was a fiction that obscured the ways in which scholarship served the interests of ecclesiastical and political institutions. Scholarly practices varied from one confessional context to another, and the progress of 'criticism' was never straightforward. The study demonstrates this by placing scholarly works in dialogue with works of dogmatic theology, and comparing examples from multiple confessional and national contexts. It offers major revisionist treatments of canonical figures in the history of scholarship, such as Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, John Selden, Hugo Grotius, and Louis Cappel, based on unstudied archival as well as printed sources; and it places those figures alongside their more marginal, overlooked counterparts. It also contextualizes scholarly correspondence and other forms of intellectual exchange by considering them alongside the records of political and ecclesiastical bodies. Throughout, the study combines the methods of the history of scholarship with techniques drawn from other fields, including literary, political, and religious history. As well as presenting a new history of seventeenth-century biblical criticism, it also critiques modern scholarly assumptions about the relationships between erudition, humanistic culture, political activism, and religious identity.

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive overview of modern seaports from a legal perspective. Further, it provides a basic toolkit for establishing a legal doctrine of seaports, the instruments of said toolkit being the very few legal norms specifically targeting seaports, which are examined as such rather than through the lens of other, more established disciplines, such as the law of the sea or transportation law. It is a first, necessary step toward giving seaports the status they rightfully deserve in legal studies. Despite centuries of international law studies and decades of EU law evolution, seaports have remained stuck in limbo. From a law of the sea perspective, seaports belong to the land, an approach that is often clearly reflected in national maritime legislation. The other branches of international law do not focus on seaports, since they are considered to belong to the sea. The port communities, for their part, have availed themselves of the “port specificity” concept. In recent decades, containerization has transformed ports into key hubs of the globalized economy, but also into vital checkpoints of the War on Terror, due to the security risks posed by the millions of sealed containers circulating worldwide. Moreover, tragic maritime incidents have shown that seaports are the only reliable sentinels of the seas, being the only places where the systematic inspection of ships is feasible. This has led to the adoption of specific international and EU rules. Those rules, however, remain fragmented, highly specialized and technical; as such, they are unsuitable for creating an organic legal seaport regime: this objective can only be achieved with a significant contribution from legal doctrine.