Franciscans and Scotists on War: John Duns Scotus’s Theology, Anti-Judaism, and Holy War in Early Modernity

Franciscan friars were everywhere in the early modern Catholic world, a world that stretched from the Americas, through Western and Central Europe, to the Middle East and Asia. This global brotherhood was as deeply entangled in the great religious wars that convulsed Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as it was in the Spanish and Portuguese empires. While the political and imperial theories of Dominicans like Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome de Las Casas, who took the theology of Thomas Aquinas as their starting point, are well-known, this has not been the case for Franciscan thinking until now.

The Franciscans and their allies built a body of political writings around the theology of John Duns Scotus (1265/6-1308), and this book presents a wide selection of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Scotist writings on politics, warfare, and empire in English for the first time. Beginning with Scotus’s own doctrine on the forced baptism of Jews, this collection translates John Mair (1467-1550) on European imperialism and holy war, Alfonso de Castro (1495-1558) on the Schmalkaldic War of the 1540s, Juan Focher (1497-1572) on the war against the Chichimeca Indians of Mexico, and John Punch on the British and Irish Civil Wars of the 1640s and 1650s.

The availability of these primary sources for teaching and research will clarify the connection between religion, politics, and imperialism in the early modern world.

Ian Campbell is Reader in Early Modern Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. He is the author of Renaissance Humanism and Ethnicity before Race: The Irish and the English in the Seventeenth Century (2013), and has edited, with Floris Verhaart, Protestant Politics Beyond Calvin: Reformed Theologians on War in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (2022).

Todd M. Rester is Associate Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary, US. He has edited, with Stephen M. Coleman, Faith in the Time of Plague (2021), a collection of Protestant and Reformed writings on epidemics. He has translated many early modern Reformed theological works, including (with Andrew McGinnis) Franciscus Junius’s Mosaic Polity (2015), and (with Joel R. Beeke) Petrus Van Mastrich’s Theoretical-Practical Theology (2 vols, 2018-2019).