page_title: Jean Bodin
section_title: The Papacy
hierarchical_section_title: Jean Bodin / Reception / The Papacy
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: De i discorsi politici libri cinque ... ne i quali viene riprovata la dottrina politica di Giovanni Bodino e difesa quella di Aristotele, di Fabio Albergati, Roma 1602 e Venezia 1603
context_page_description: Jean Bodin was a French jurist and political philosopher, member of the Parlement of Paris and professor of law in Toulouse. He is best known for his theory of sovereignty; he was also an influential writer on demonology.
  Bodin lived during the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and wrote against the background of religious conflict in France. He remained a nominal Catholic throughout his life but was critical of papal authority over governments, favouring the strong central control of a national monarchy as an antidote to factional strife. Toward the end of his life he wrote, but did not publish, a dialogue among different religions, including representatives of Judaism, Islam and natural theology, in which all agreed to coexist in concord.
context_section_description: Works of Bodin were soon placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum for various reasons, including discussion of Fortune (against free will), and reason of state. The Methodus went on the Index in 1590; Robert Bellarmine as censor found it of some merit in its learning, but the author to be a heretic or atheist, critical of the papacy and much too sympathetic to Charles Du Moulin in particular. Other works followed in 1593. All his work was placed on the Index in 1628; the prohibition on the Theatrum continued into the 20th century. Venetian theologians were described as followers of Machiavelli and Bodin by Giovanni Amato.
  Bellarmine's Tractatus de potestate summi pontificis in temporalibus reiterated, against Bodin's sovereignty theory, an indirect form of the traditional papal deposing power to release subjects from the duty of obedience to tyrants. Jakob Keller, in an apologetical work on behalf of limited justifications for tyrannicide, treated Bodin as a serious opponent on the argument that subjects can only resist a tyrant passively, with views on the Empire that were offensive.
caption: Bodin mentioned on the title page of Fabio Albergati's Discorsi politici, in 1602. Albergati wrote against Bodin from 1595, comparing his political theories unfavourably with those of Aristotle.[167]
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