This wide-ranging and innovative book by Massimiliano Traversino Di Cristo appears after a long period of preparation. Contrary to the rather common tendency of the present times to publish hurried and repetitive results based on short research stints, this book comes at the end of a genuine maturation. Starting from a demanding tripartite doctoral thesis that was written for the universities of Trent, Geneva, and London (Birkbeck College), this evolution took place over intermediate stages, including, six years ago, the publication of another book, Diritto e teologia alle soglie dell’età moderna: Il problema della potentia Dei absoluta in Giordano Bruno (Naples: Editoriale Scientifica, 2015), which should be seen as a first exposition of the same issue that is discussed here more widely and deeply.
As I wrote in my preface to that book, what the author presented in it was a ‘first and still provisional testimony’ of a process of discovery that had begun with a master’s thesis which had been defended in 2010 at the University of Trent under my supervision. The project then developed in contact with other scholars, among whom I would like to remember my colleagues Alberto Bondolfi and Anton Schütz, along with dear departed friends Jean-François Malherbe and Diego Panizza.
The master’s thesis, entitled Il problema della potestas absoluta fra diritto e teologia nel secolo XVI, first reviewed the hypotheses and issues that are still central to the present book. For example, the special attention that both the master’s thesis and this book pay to Giordano Bruno’s quaestiones, which Traversino Di Cristo tackles by attentively avoiding any convenient simplification and schematization. By taking up the baton of the master’s and doctoral theses (the latter carried out at the universities of Trent, Geneva, and London), the contribution that this book brings to a better understanding of early-modern legal-theological ideas will certainly exert a remarkable influence on future studies on modernity thanks to its capacity to reassess clichés and stereotypes belonging to a long historiographical tradition that urgently needs a ‘diagonalized’ reconsideration—to use an expression dear to the Foucault that Traversino Di Cristo quotes in the Introduction to this book.
Among the distorted schematizations that the book dismisses by focusing on the theological roots of modern Western legal and political absolutism, one finds old and no-longer reliable historical periodizations. The different approach proposed by Traversino Di Cristo provides us with a more vivid and
In presenting Traversino Di Cristo’s Diritto e teologia, I wrote that, theology and law constitute two ‘new sciences’ in the Middle Ages—at least for the status they acquire by emerging at the same time. I also noted that this took place at the extraordinary turning-point that was the twelfth century and that Harold J. Berman indicated as the ‘revolution’ which lay at the origin of the dialectics in Western civilization between the spiritual and temporal realms. At the end of the sixteenth century they were still the necessary terms of a ‘symbiosis’, from which the modern world arises. As I explained, one should resist proto-nineteenth-century temptations (that still constantly recur) to simplify and ideologize the relations between theology and law and theology and politics, as well as their claim to place the source of legal-political absolutism in ‘theistic’ theology and, more precisely, in late-medieval and early-modern theological voluntarism (when theology undergoes a complex process of juridification through the elaboration of the two concepts of potestas Dei absoluta and potestas Dei ordinata). Instead one should take up, as Traversino Di Cristo suggests, the mature vision of a scholastic tradition that gradually develops from the end of the eleventh century to the first years of the seventeenth. This final stage is fraught with the results of a dramatic revision of the whole conceptual and lexical heritage of what we still call the middle ages. This is the period of which Giordano Bruno, Alberico Gentili, and Jean Bodin are the fullest and complex expressions precisely because of their heightened scholasticism, at a time when medieval arguments were taken to their extreme consequences, and the construction of the categories of legal and political modernity takes their place.
The monograph published here concludes an enquiry and a deliberation that can, as I already said, hugely modify our perception of the process of formation of the basic categories of legal and political modernity. Among these categories, the one concerning the idea and practice of sovereignty, in other words potestas absoluta, is certainly not the least important. We owe Massimiliano Traversino Di Cristo a debt of gratitude for his difficult and courageous contribution towards a profound revision of the idola fori which the past century handed down to us. This duty constitutes an intellectual and moral task that the new generations of historians must take up without hesitation.