Early Modern Sovereignties

Erik De Bom, Ph.D. (2009), KU Leuven, is Research Fellow at that university. He has published on the history of political thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, early-modern intellectual history and Renaissance humanism. Randall Lesaffer is Professor of legal history at KU Leuven as well as Tilburg University. His research focuses on the historical development of the law of nations in Europa since the sixteenth century. He is general editor of Oxford Historical Treaties and The Cambridge History of International Law. Werner Thomas is professor of Spanish and Spanish American History at KU Leuven. He publishes on the Low Countries and the Spanish monarchy, the repression of Protestantism in Spain, and the government of Archdukes Albert and Isabella in the Southern Netherlands.

List of Tables

Notes on Contributors



Introduction

  Werner Thomas



PART 1

The Construction of Sovereignty



1 Sovereignty in Grotius

  Hans Blom



2 Ideas on Sovereignty

 Soto, Vázquez and Grotius

  Gustaaf van Nifterik



3 Conform to the Government and Acknowledge the Sovereignty

 Simon Stevin and François Vranck, a Practical Approach to Contested Sovereignty

  Lies van Aelst



PART 2

The Use and Limits of Sovereignty



4 Sovereignty as Argument

 The Habsburg-Dutch Struggle for Territory before and after Westphalia, 1576–1664

  Bram De Ridder



5 Sovereignty and Early Modern Private Property Rights

  Shavana Musa



6 The ‘Perfect Principality’ of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella

 Project and Reality of a ‘Separate Sovereignty’ of the Spanish Crown, 1529–1621

  Alicia Esteban Estríngana



PART 3

Sovereigns and Sovereignty in Practice



7 ‘The King is the Real Sovereign of this Countries’

 Politics of Justice and Order from the Duke of Alba in the Netherlands, 1567–1571

  Gustaaf Janssens



8 Electing a Prince

 the Popular Transfer of Sovereignty at the End of the Sixteenth Century

  José Javier Ruiz Ibáñez



9 North-Netherlandish Sovereigns at Work in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century

  Simon Groenveld



10 Early Seventeenth-Century Representative Institutions and Law Making in the Habsburg Netherlands

  René Vermeir



Index