Annabel Brett
Biographic Data
| ID | 226810 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Annabel Brett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Annabel |
| FAMILY NAME | Brett |
| SIGNATURE | BRETT A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0009-0004-6725-8425 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Sacralizing Dominion
White Christian nationalism presents itself as restoration—of a Christian nation, a moral order, a rightful hierarchy. This article argues that what it restores is the world-making rhetoric of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DoCD). Reading the fifteenth-century papal bulls, their sedimentation into United States law, culture, religion, and contemporary dominionist discourse as a single rhetorical formation, we show that the bulls’ vocabulary…
Religious Nationalism, Mythic Maps, and the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth
This article argues that what we call “religious nationalism” is best understood as a mythic, juridical, and cartographic project that naturalizes domination. Drawing on Indigenous critiques of borders—summarized in the refrain “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”—and on concepts such as the One Dish One Spoon wampum, the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s “white possessive,” we show how eurochristian na…
Teaching & Learning Guide for
Please include a short paragraph setting the scene for example the context for the article, why the topic is important to the field, etc. Akwesasne Notes et al., Basic Call to Consciousness, [Rev. ed.] ([Akwesasne Notes] Native Voices, 2005). Originally published in 1978 and revised in 2005, Basic Call to Consciousness is a foundational text for Indigenous activism and Indigenous studies. The book highlights Haudenosaunee intellectual, spiritual,…
Examining the Doctrine of Discovery in Religion and Indigenous Studies
Since the publication of Pagans in the Promised Land by Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape), scholarship on the Doctrine of Discovery has expanded significantly as a central issue in Indigenous law and politics. However, its implications remain underexamined in Religious Studies, Indigenous Studies, and legal scholarship. This article analyzes the matrix of enslavement, exploitation, and extraction that Newcomb identifies within settler‐colonial s…
Preface and Introduction
The Office of the External Special Rapporteur on Religious Freedom or Belief contacted Philip P. Arnold, the Indigenous Values Initiative (IVI), and the American Indian Law Alliance (AILA), and asked us to join a call to give input on a new report on Indigenous Religious Freedom or Belief. Numerous Indigenous NGOs, Indigenous nations, and leaders were on the call. The Special Rapporteur Ahmed Shaheed and his staff were most receptive to the feedb…
On the Limits of the Concept of Religious Freedom in Indigenous Communities
In this essay, we will argue that firstly, the international and national legal framings of religion or belief are limited in scope, and one must ask not only religious freedom for whom but also from whom. Secondly, we will underscore the continued limitations of international human rights-based discourse. Why are Indigenous nations consistently excluded from rights-based discourses? We have the UN Declaration on Human Rights (UNDHR), the UN Decl…
Documenting Domination
The Doctrine of Christian Discovery is a series of fifteenth-century papal bulls that served as the theological and legal justification for the colonization of the world and the enslavement of the Original Free Nations, starting first on the African continent before spreading across the globe. In the 1800s, these bulls and other documents like The Requerimiento and colonial charters would be codified and enshrined together in U.S. law as the Doct…
Use, War, and Commercial Society. Changing Paradigms of Human Relations with Animals in the Early Modern Law of Nature and of Nations
The ideas of a human war on nature, and a human war on animals more specifically, are now current in international politics and international law. This article unearths a historical understanding of war on animals as one paradigm of human relations with animals in the early modern law of nature and of nations (16th to 18th centuries). It shows how dominium (property or mastery) over animals was placed at the origin of all human dominium , and was…
Rights of and over Animals in the Ius Naturae et Gentium (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
De jure naturae et gentium, "The law of nature and of nations," is the title of Samuel Pufendorf's eight-volume masterpiece of philosophical jurisprudence, first published in 1672. It provides the tag by which an entire discourse is known, one that dominated legal philosophy at European universities for over two hundred years. Pufendorf's Protestant articulation of its principles was pivotal both for transmitting it to the Eighteenth Century and …
The Subject of Sovereignty
Hugo Grotius’s account of sovereign power in De iure belli ac pacis occupies a contested place in recent genealogies of modern sovereignty. This article takes a fresh approach by arguing that Grotius’s legal arguments do not do their work alone. They function within a broader horizon of what he calls “morals,” a field of reasoning that has debts to scholastic moral theology and Aristotelian moral science. Grotius's conception of sovereignty repre…
Sources in the Scholastic Legacy
This chapter observes that the ‘sources of international law’ is a complicated concept for later scholastic authors. This is because they have no doctrine of ‘sources’ and because the phrase ius gentium, as they employ it, is not appropriately translated by ‘international law’. When they write about the ius gentium, they are engaged in an exercise of hermeneutic reconstruction of a law that has already been legislated, a reconstruction that is al…
Doing Without an Original
It is only by stepping out of ‘ human rights’ that we can properly see what is involved in claiming them. Both our rights, and we ourselves, are the product of history, a history of language that is at the same time a history of politics and conflict.
The space of politics and the space of war in Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis
Despite the currency of the ‘spatial turn’ in history more generally, the history of political thought has not yet turned its attention to the concept of space in any systematic way. The natural rights tradition seems particularly resistant to such a reading. The present article seeks to uncover how notions of space and spatial relations intersect with law and legal relations in a key text of that tradition. I argue that space is central to the w…
Later Scholastic Philosophy of Law
Freedom and the Construction of Europe
Freedom, today perceived simply as a human right, was a continually contested idea in the early modern period. In Freedom and the Construction of Europe an international group of scholars explore the richness, diversity and complexity of thinking about freedom in the shaping of modernity. Volume 2 considers free persons and free states, examining differing views about freedom of thought and action and their relations to conceptions of citizenship…
Changes of State
This is a book about the theory of the city or commonwealth, what would come to be called the state, in early modern natural law discourse. It takes a fresh approach by looking at this political entity from the perspective of its boundaries and those who crossed them. The book begins with a classic debate from the Spanish sixteenth century over the political treatment of mendicants, showing how cosmopolitan ideals of porous boundaries could simul…
Changes of State
A Note on the Text ix Acknowledgements xi INTRODUCTION: On the threshold of the state 1 CHAPTER ONE: Travelling the borderline 11 CHAPTER TWO: Constructing human agency 37 CHAPTER THREE: Natural law 62 CHAPTER FOUR: Natural liberty 90 CHAPTER FIVE: Kingdoms founded 115 CHAPTER SIX: The lives of subjects 142 CHAPTER SEVEN: Locality 169 CHAPTER EIGHT: Re-placing the state 195 Bibliography of works cited 225 Index 237
'The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth'
Hobbes's relation to the later Aristotelian tradition, in both its scholastic and its humanists variants, has been increasingly explored by scholars. However, on two fundamental points (the naturalness of the city and the use of the matter/form distinction in the political works), there is more to be said in this connection. A close examination of a range of late Renaissance commentaries on Aristotle's Politics shows that they elucidate a picture…
Politics, Right(s) and Human Freedom in Marsilius of Padua
Let me begin by clarifying the sense of my title within a volume dedicated to exploring the development of the notion of individual rights between the late-medieval and the early-modern periods. It is intended in the first place to call attention to a distinctive feature of Marsilius’ treatment of rights, which I shall argue is in many ways authentically Aristotelian (despite the lack of subjective or individual rights in Aristotle): and that is …
Rethinking The Foundations of Modern Political Thought
Quentin Skinner's classic study The Foundations of Modern Political Thought was first published by Cambridge in 1978. This was the first of a series of outstanding publications that have changed forever the way the history of political thought is taught and practised. Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought looks afresh at the impact of the original work, asks why it still matters, and considers a number of significant agendas that…
Marsilius of Padua
The Defender of the Peace of Marsilius of Padua is a massively influential text in the history of western political thought. Marsilius offers a detailed analysis and explanation of human political communities, before going on to attack what he sees as the obstacles to peaceful human coexistence - principally the contemporary papacy. Annabel Brett's authoritative rendition of the Defensor Pacis was the first new translation in English for fifty ye…
Natural Right and Civil Community
Hugo Grotius has always been viewed as a theorist of either international or natural law. However, these designations obscure the civic focus of his work, from his early republican treatises through to De iure belli ac pacis . From sixteenth-century humanist and legal-humanist Aristotelianism, Grotius constructed a framework of natural right which enabled him on the one hand to locate the origins of the civil community in natural man's juridical …
Natural Right and Civil Community
Hugo Grotius has always been viewed as a theorist of either international or natural law. However, these designations obscure the civic focus of his work, from his early republican treatises through to De iure belli ac pacis . From sixteenth-century humanist and legal-humanist Aristotelianism, Grotius constructed a framework of natural right which enabled him on the one hand to locate the origins of the civil community in natural man's juridical …
Use, War, and Commercial Society. Changing Paradigms of Human Relations with Animals in the Early Modern Law of Nature and of Nations
The ideas of a human war on nature, and a human war on animals more specifically, are now current in international politics and international law. This article unearths a historical understanding of war on animals as one paradigm of human relations with animals in the early modern law of nature and of nations (16th to 18th centuries). It shows how dominium (property or mastery) over animals was placed at the origin of all human dominium , and was…
Rights of and over Animals in the Ius Naturae et Gentium (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
De jure naturae et gentium, "The law of nature and of nations," is the title of Samuel Pufendorf's eight-volume masterpiece of philosophical jurisprudence, first published in 1672. It provides the tag by which an entire discourse is known, one that dominated legal philosophy at European universities for over two hundred years. Pufendorf's Protestant articulation of its principles was pivotal both for transmitting it to the Eighteenth Century and …
The Subject of Sovereignty
Hugo Grotius’s account of sovereign power in De iure belli ac pacis occupies a contested place in recent genealogies of modern sovereignty. This article takes a fresh approach by arguing that Grotius’s legal arguments do not do their work alone. They function within a broader horizon of what he calls “morals,” a field of reasoning that has debts to scholastic moral theology and Aristotelian moral science. Grotius's conception of sovereignty repre…
The space of politics and the space of war in Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis
Despite the currency of the ‘spatial turn’ in history more generally, the history of political thought has not yet turned its attention to the concept of space in any systematic way. The natural rights tradition seems particularly resistant to such a reading. The present article seeks to uncover how notions of space and spatial relations intersect with law and legal relations in a key text of that tradition. I argue that space is central to the w…
Natural Right and Civil Community
Hugo Grotius has always been viewed as a theorist of either international or natural law. However, these designations obscure the civic focus of his work, from his early republican treatises through to De iure belli ac pacis . From sixteenth-century humanist and legal-humanist Aristotelianism, Grotius constructed a framework of natural right which enabled him on the one hand to locate the origins of the civil community in natural man's juridical …
Marsilius of Padua
The Defender of the Peace of Marsilius of Padua is a massively influential text in the history of western political thought. Marsilius offers a detailed analysis and explanation of human political communities, before going on to attack what he sees as the obstacles to peaceful human coexistence - principally the contemporary papacy. Annabel Brett's authoritative rendition of the Defensor Pacis was the first new translation in English for fifty ye…
Politics, Right(s) and Human Freedom in Marsilius of Padua
Let me begin by clarifying the sense of my title within a volume dedicated to exploring the development of the notion of individual rights between the late-medieval and the early-modern periods. It is intended in the first place to call attention to a distinctive feature of Marsilius’ treatment of rights, which I shall argue is in many ways authentically Aristotelian (despite the lack of subjective or individual rights in Aristotle): and that is …
Rethinking The Foundations of Modern Political Thought
Quentin Skinner's classic study The Foundations of Modern Political Thought was first published by Cambridge in 1978. This was the first of a series of outstanding publications that have changed forever the way the history of political thought is taught and practised. Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought looks afresh at the impact of the original work, asks why it still matters, and considers a number of significant agendas that…
'The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth'
Hobbes's relation to the later Aristotelian tradition, in both its scholastic and its humanists variants, has been increasingly explored by scholars. However, on two fundamental points (the naturalness of the city and the use of the matter/form distinction in the political works), there is more to be said in this connection. A close examination of a range of late Renaissance commentaries on Aristotle's Politics shows that they elucidate a picture…
Changes of State
This is a book about the theory of the city or commonwealth, what would come to be called the state, in early modern natural law discourse. It takes a fresh approach by looking at this political entity from the perspective of its boundaries and those who crossed them. The book begins with a classic debate from the Spanish sixteenth century over the political treatment of mendicants, showing how cosmopolitan ideals of porous boundaries could simul…
Changes of State
A Note on the Text ix Acknowledgements xi INTRODUCTION: On the threshold of the state 1 CHAPTER ONE: Travelling the borderline 11 CHAPTER TWO: Constructing human agency 37 CHAPTER THREE: Natural law 62 CHAPTER FOUR: Natural liberty 90 CHAPTER FIVE: Kingdoms founded 115 CHAPTER SIX: The lives of subjects 142 CHAPTER SEVEN: Locality 169 CHAPTER EIGHT: Re-placing the state 195 Bibliography of works cited 225 Index 237
Freedom and the Construction of Europe
Freedom, today perceived simply as a human right, was a continually contested idea in the early modern period. In Freedom and the Construction of Europe an international group of scholars explore the richness, diversity and complexity of thinking about freedom in the shaping of modernity. Volume 2 considers free persons and free states, examining differing views about freedom of thought and action and their relations to conceptions of citizenship…
Later Scholastic Philosophy of Law
The space of politics and the space of war in Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis
Despite the currency of the ‘spatial turn’ in history more generally, the history of political thought has not yet turned its attention to the concept of space in any systematic way. The natural rights tradition seems particularly resistant to such a reading. The present article seeks to uncover how notions of space and spatial relations intersect with law and legal relations in a key text of that tradition. I argue that space is central to the w…
Sources in the Scholastic Legacy
This chapter observes that the ‘sources of international law’ is a complicated concept for later scholastic authors. This is because they have no doctrine of ‘sources’ and because the phrase ius gentium, as they employ it, is not appropriately translated by ‘international law’. When they write about the ius gentium, they are engaged in an exercise of hermeneutic reconstruction of a law that has already been legislated, a reconstruction that is al…
Doing Without an Original
It is only by stepping out of ‘ human rights’ that we can properly see what is involved in claiming them. Both our rights, and we ourselves, are the product of history, a history of language that is at the same time a history of politics and conflict.
The Subject of Sovereignty
Hugo Grotius’s account of sovereign power in De iure belli ac pacis occupies a contested place in recent genealogies of modern sovereignty. This article takes a fresh approach by arguing that Grotius’s legal arguments do not do their work alone. They function within a broader horizon of what he calls “morals,” a field of reasoning that has debts to scholastic moral theology and Aristotelian moral science. Grotius's conception of sovereignty repre…
Rights of and over Animals in the Ius Naturae et Gentium (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
De jure naturae et gentium, "The law of nature and of nations," is the title of Samuel Pufendorf's eight-volume masterpiece of philosophical jurisprudence, first published in 1672. It provides the tag by which an entire discourse is known, one that dominated legal philosophy at European universities for over two hundred years. Pufendorf's Protestant articulation of its principles was pivotal both for transmitting it to the Eighteenth Century and …
Use, War, and Commercial Society. Changing Paradigms of Human Relations with Animals in the Early Modern Law of Nature and of Nations
The ideas of a human war on nature, and a human war on animals more specifically, are now current in international politics and international law. This article unearths a historical understanding of war on animals as one paradigm of human relations with animals in the early modern law of nature and of nations (16th to 18th centuries). It shows how dominium (property or mastery) over animals was placed at the origin of all human dominium , and was…
Preface and Introduction
The Office of the External Special Rapporteur on Religious Freedom or Belief contacted Philip P. Arnold, the Indigenous Values Initiative (IVI), and the American Indian Law Alliance (AILA), and asked us to join a call to give input on a new report on Indigenous Religious Freedom or Belief. Numerous Indigenous NGOs, Indigenous nations, and leaders were on the call. The Special Rapporteur Ahmed Shaheed and his staff were most receptive to the feedb…
On the Limits of the Concept of Religious Freedom in Indigenous Communities
In this essay, we will argue that firstly, the international and national legal framings of religion or belief are limited in scope, and one must ask not only religious freedom for whom but also from whom. Secondly, we will underscore the continued limitations of international human rights-based discourse. Why are Indigenous nations consistently excluded from rights-based discourses? We have the UN Declaration on Human Rights (UNDHR), the UN Decl…
Documenting Domination
The Doctrine of Christian Discovery is a series of fifteenth-century papal bulls that served as the theological and legal justification for the colonization of the world and the enslavement of the Original Free Nations, starting first on the African continent before spreading across the globe. In the 1800s, these bulls and other documents like The Requerimiento and colonial charters would be codified and enshrined together in U.S. law as the Doct…
Sacralizing Dominion
White Christian nationalism presents itself as restoration—of a Christian nation, a moral order, a rightful hierarchy. This article argues that what it restores is the world-making rhetoric of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DoCD). Reading the fifteenth-century papal bulls, their sedimentation into United States law, culture, religion, and contemporary dominionist discourse as a single rhetorical formation, we show that the bulls’ vocabulary…
Religious Nationalism, Mythic Maps, and the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth
This article argues that what we call “religious nationalism” is best understood as a mythic, juridical, and cartographic project that naturalizes domination. Drawing on Indigenous critiques of borders—summarized in the refrain “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”—and on concepts such as the One Dish One Spoon wampum, the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s “white possessive,” we show how eurochristian na…
Teaching & Learning Guide for
Please include a short paragraph setting the scene for example the context for the article, why the topic is important to the field, etc. Akwesasne Notes et al., Basic Call to Consciousness, [Rev. ed.] ([Akwesasne Notes] Native Voices, 2005). Originally published in 1978 and revised in 2005, Basic Call to Consciousness is a foundational text for Indigenous activism and Indigenous studies. The book highlights Haudenosaunee intellectual, spiritual,…
Examining the Doctrine of Discovery in Religion and Indigenous Studies
Since the publication of Pagans in the Promised Land by Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape), scholarship on the Doctrine of Discovery has expanded significantly as a central issue in Indigenous law and politics. However, its implications remain underexamined in Religious Studies, Indigenous Studies, and legal scholarship. This article analyzes the matrix of enslavement, exploitation, and extraction that Newcomb identifies within settler‐colonial s…
Law (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Politics (13 works) · History (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought (7 works) · Doctrine (5 works) · Indigenous (5 works)