Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1966. The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages, based on three guest lectures given at Johns Hopkins University in 1965, explores the place of the individual in medieval European society. Looking at legal sources and political ideology of the era, Ullmann concludes that, for most of the Middle Ages, the individual was defined as a subject rather than a citizen, but the modern concept of citizenship gradually supplanted the subject model from the late Middle Ages onward. Ullmann lays out the theological basis of the political theory that cast the medieval individual as an inferior, abstract subject. The individual citizen who emerged during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, by contrast, was an autonomous participant in affairs of state. Several intellectual trends made this humanistic conception of the individual possible, among them the rehabilitation of vernacular writing during the thirteenth century and the growing interest in nature, natural phi
Table of ContentsPreface
Lecture 1. The Abstract Thesis: The Ecclesiological and Corporational Theme of Subject and Society
Lecture 2. The Practical Thesis: The Constitutional Significance of the Feudal Relationship and Its Bearing on the Individual in Society
Lecture 3. The Humanistic Thesis: The Emergence of the Citizen
Index
