H owell A. L loyd . Jean Bodin

In this new study, Jean Bodin: “This Pre-eminent Man of France,” Howell A. Lloyd offers a comprehensive survey of the life and work of the sixteenth-century French prose writer and political thinker Jean Bodin. Lloyd comes to the task well prepared, having organized two workshops and edited the proceedings under the title The Reception of Bodin with Brill in 2013. The stated ambition of his new work is to fill a gap in a field of scholarship characterized by “both the proliferation of narrowly focused discussions and the relative absence of comprehensive studies” (ix). I think we can credit the author with having kept his word and provided the missing monograph on Bodin. Lloyd has organized his material in chronological order, covering the main events of Bodin’s life and all his works, major and minor. Through careful and intelligent textual analysis, the author identifies the recurrent themes and obsessions of Bodin’s work, from his humanist commentary on Oppian of 1555 to his posthumously published dialogue Colloquium Heptaplomeres, while also addressing the main controversies that have arisen among Bodin scholars. The focus is on Bodin’s most important publications, the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem of 1566; the Six livres de la République of 1576; the treatise on witchcraft, De la démonomanie des sorciers of 1580; and the Universae naturae theatrum of 1596, the year of Bodin’s death. Among the minor writings, many of them edited by Paul Rose for Droz in 1980, is the undated letter to Jean Bautru, thought to have been sent in the early 1560s; this letter prompts a thorough and thoughtful discussion (62–66), which raises a question that has baffled criticism for centuries: What, if anything, was Bodin’s religion? This question reemerges throughout the course of this intellectual biography, though it remains tantalizingly unresolved.

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