Jean Bodin, ‘This Pre-Eminent Man of France’: An Intellectual Biography (2025)

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Jean Bodin, ‘This Pre-Eminent Man of France’: An Intellectual Biography

. By

Howell A.

Lloyd

.

Oxford

:

OUP

.

2017

. xiv +

311

pp. £75.00. ISBN 978 0 1988 0014 9.

Emma Claussen

New College, Oxford

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French History, Volume 32, Issue 2, June 2018, Pages 282–284, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/cry014

Published:

03 May 2018

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This book is a timely attempt to ‘fill a gap in the available literature on one of France’s most significant thinkers’. It is a learned, elegant work, coming at what is a fertile moment in Bodin studies thanks in part to the author’s recent edited volume, The Reception of Bodin; other key contributions include the Harvard Bodin Project and the recent edition of Bodin’s Démonomanie.

Lloyd is clear about what we do not know about the enigmatic Bodin’s actual life: we do not know which books he owned or how he read them other than through his citations; we do not know if he was the ‘Jehan Baudin’ who was imprisoned for Reformist beliefs in 1569; where he was for the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacres; or if he was the author of the Colloquium Heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium (but Lloyd, after reviewing the critical debate, thinks he probably was). There is an appendix on the problem of identifying the real Bodin in the archive, owing to his very common name. Still, Lloyd paints a detailed picture of the educational setting of the 1540s and 1550s before Bodin’s rise to prominence and brings to light rarely discussed episodes in Bodin’s later life, such as his failures of tact in England c. 1581. Fed by such anecdotes, a compelling character portrait emerges of a man with a voracious intellect and vigorous social persona: Lloyd describes Bodin as ‘congenitally argumentative’, notes his ‘high moral tone’ in the République and that he seems to have ‘lacked the qualities of oral eloquence and engaging personality required for a legal career’; he describes too Bodin’s grandiose ambitions, and attraction to the universal, the ‘lodestar of his thought’ and the key, in Bodin’s view, to constructing a pluralist, and yet non-conflictual, religious and political framework. Lloyd is prepared to criticize Bodin as well as to praise him, writing that the Letter to Malestroit (1568) shows him ‘at his worst’, but defending him against charges of incoherence laid against the Methodus (1566) by Grafton and others; Lloyd argues that Bodin was nothing if not true to his purpose. This foreshadows the conclusion of the entire book: that Bodin more or less achieved his vast ambition of writing human, natural and divine histories and exposing the association of each with particular virtues, and spheres of law.

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