Canon Law, the Expansion of Europe, and World Order: 612 (Variorum Collected Studies) - Hardcover

'...an important distillation of scholarship...of interest to all historians of canon law and international law.' Studia Canonica , Vol. 33, No. 2 ' Muldoon has done historical scholarship a service by exploring numerous works of canon law bearing on European expansion and seeking to understand the legal dimension of that process in all its complexity.' Sixteenth-Century Journal, vol XXXI/3

The articles in this volume trace the development of the theory that humanity forms a single world community and that there exists a body of law governing the relations among the members of that community. These ideas first appeared in the writings of the medieval canon lawyers and received their fullest development in the writings of early modern Spanish intellectuals. Conflict and contact with ’the infidel’ provided a stimulus for the elaboration of these ideas in the later Middle Ages, but major impetus was given by the English subjugation of Ireland, and by the discovery of the Americas. This body of work paved the way for the modern notions of an international legal order and universal norms of behavior usually associated with the publication of Hugo Grotius’s work in the seventeenth century.