This Palgrave Pivot examines how prominent thinkers throughout history, from ancient Greece to sixteenth-century France, have perceived tyrants and tyranny. Ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were the first to build a vocabulary for tyrants and the forms of government they corrupted. Thirteenth century analyses of tyranny by Thomas Aquinas and John of Salisbury, revived from Antiquity, were recast as short observations about what tyrants do. They claimed that tyrants govern for their own advantage, not for the people. Tyrants could be usurpers, increase taxes, and live in luxury. The list of tyrannical actions grew over time, especially in periods of turmoil and civil war, often raising the question: When can a tyrant be legitimately deposed or killed? In offering a brief biography of these political philosophers, including Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bodin, and others, along with their views on tyrannical behavior, Orest Ranum reveals how the concept of tyranny has been shaped over time, and how it still persists in political thought to this day.

Étienne Pasquier (1529–1615) was a lawyer, royal official, man of letters, and historian. He represented the University of Paris in its 1565 suit to dislodge a Jesuit school from Paris. Despite royal support, the Jesuits remained in conflict with many institutions, which in 1595 led to their expulsion from much of the realm. With ever-increasing polemics, Pasquier continued to oppose the Jesuits. To further his aims, he published a dialog between a Jesuit (almost certainly Louis Richeome) and a lawyer (Pasquier himself). He called it the Jesuits’ Catechism (1602). Pasquier’s work did not stop the French king from welcoming the Jesuits back. However, Pasquier’s Catechism remained central to Jansenist and other anti-Jesuit agitation up to the Society’s 1773 suppression and beyond.

What if the American experiment is twofold, encompassing both democracy and tyranny? That is the question at the core of this book, which traces some of ways that Americans across the nineteenth century understood the perversions tyranny introduced into both their polity and society. While some informed their thinking with reference to classical texts, which comprehensively consider tyranny's dangers, most drew on a more contemporary source--Napoleon Bonaparte, the century's most famous man and its most notorious tyrant. Because Napoleon defined tyranny around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world--its features and emergence, its relationship to democratic institutions, its effects on persons and peoples--he provides a way for nineteenth-century Americans to explore the parameters of tyranny and their complicity in its cruelties. Napoleon helps us see the decidedly plural forms of tyranny in the US, bringing their fictions into focus. At the same time, however, there are distinctly American modes of tyranny. From the tyrannical style of the American imagination to the usurping potential of American individualism, Elizabeth Duquette shows that tyranny is as American as democracy.

The outcome of a scientific conference organized in November 2021, this volume aims to provide a picture of how the aristocratic political class of France and Moldavia sought to challenge monarchical power and how the latter tried to reassert itself in face of this turbulent nobility, in the context of the endemic civil wars that plagued both countries during the chosen period. For this purpose, this volume tries to analyze both the ideological issues involved in these endemic struggles, as they appear in the propaganda of the period, and the practical aspects and consequences (political intrigues or military developments) of the conflictual relationship between the rulers of these countries and their discontented nobles. Divided into two sections, one dedicated to the case of France during the Wars of Religion, the other to Moldavia from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century, this volume is also the result of a collaborative work between French and Romanian academics, who thus tried to bridge what seemed like a (large) geographical gap in order to benefit from different perspectives and thus gain a better insight into different (but maybe not so different) models of early modern European political cultures. In the end, despite the distance between them, in early modern France and Moldavia, to effectively challenge the authority of the king or prince, one had to take up arms: and the nobility, who imagined itself first and foremost as a military order, did exactly that. But there is more to this clash between ruler and rebels than a mere contest of military strength. Despite the apparent political and cultural differences between early modern France and Moldavia, there is one common feature that influenced the behaviour of the rebels in both countries: the need for a justification of the revolt. Since the rebels operated in a political environment where the king (or the prince) was the source of all legitimacy (in particular, the nobility was beholden to the traditional aristocratic ethos of loyalty towards the ruler) and this common mentality of politics shaped the actions of the ruling class, they had to persuade the public opinion (domestic or international) of the righteousness of their cause.

Examining literary narratives from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries, this book explores how writers used their craft to voice harsh criticism of the ruling class and unearths a deep distrust of kings and other authority figures during the Middle Ages.

Shakespeare, the Renaissance and Empire: Poetry, Philosophy and Politics is the second volume of this study and builds on the first, which concentrated on related matters, including geography and language. In both volumes, a key focus is close analysis of the text and an attention to Shakespeare’s use of signs, verbal and visual, to represent the world in poetry and prose, in dramatic and non-dramatic work as well as some of the contexts before, during and after the Renaissance. Shakespeare’s representation of character and action in poetry and theatre, his interpretation and subsequent interpretations of him are central to the book as seen through these topics: German Shakespeare, a life and no life, aesthetics and ethics, liberty and tyranny, philosophy and poetry, theory and practice, image and text. The book also explores the typology of then and now, local and global.

This 1999 book is about the religious life of the Greeks from the eighth century BC to the fifth century AD, looked at in the context of a variety of different cities and periods. Simon Price does not describe some abstract and self-contained system of religion or myths but examines local practices and ideas in the light of general Greek ideas, relating them for example, to gender roles and to cultural and political life (including Attic tragedy and the trial of Socrates). He also lays emphasis on the reactions to Greek religions of ancient thinkers - Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian. The evidence drawn on is of all kinds: literary texts, which are translated throughout; inscriptions, including an appendix of newly translated Greek inscriptions; and archaeology, which is highlighted in the numerous illustrations.

Throughout the early modern period, political theorists in France and England drew on the works of Plutarch to offer advice to kings and princes. Elizabeth I herself translated Plutarch in her later years, while Jacques Amyot's famous translations of Plutarch's The Parallel Lives led to the wide distribution of his work and served as a key resource for Shakespeare in the writing of his Roman plays, through Sir Thomas North's English translations. Rebecca Kingston's new study explores how Plutarch was translated into French and English during the Renaissance and how his works were invoked in political argument from the early modern period into the 18th century, contributing to a tradition she calls 'public humanism'. This book then traces the shifting uses of Plutarch in the Enlightenment, leading to the decline of this tradition of 'public humanism'. Throughout, the importance of Plutarch's work is highlighted as a key cultural reference and for its insight into important aspects of public service.

For the first time, the pioneering book that launched the study of art and curiosity cabinets is available in English. Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance) is a seminal work in the history of art and collecting. Originally published in German in 1908, it was the first study to interpret sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets of wonder as precursors to the modern museum, situating them within a history of collecting going back to Greco-Roman antiquity. In its comparative approach and broad geographical scope, Schlosser’s book introduced an interdisciplinary and global perspective to the study of art and material culture, laying the foundation for museum studies and the history of collections. Schlosser was an Austrian professor, curator, museum director, and leading figure of the Vienna School of art history whose work has not achieved the prominence of his contemporaries until now. This eloquent and informed translation is preceded by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s substantial introduction. Tracing Schlosser’s biography and intellectual formation in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, it contextualizes his work among that of his contemporaries, offering a wealth of insights along the way.