The Scholastic Sources of William Prynne. Theology and Politics of a Seventeenth-Century English Puritan.

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the exchange of ideas between William Prynne and the Hispanic scholastic tradition, especially in relation to the origin and limits of the king's power as essentially subordinate to Parliament. Prynne's Calvinist theology, strongly opposed to Catholic and Arminian-Anglican theology, is also considered at the beginning of the work. The work ends by concluding that in Prynne’s thought there is, along with a radical theological opposition to Arminians and Catholics, an intense reception of the political ideas of Salamonio, the schoolmen and the doctors of Salamancha, such as Mariana, Suárez, etc., largely coinciding with the sources of medieval English political law, such as Bracton, Fleta and Fortescue. From a methodological point of view, the article has been elaborated from an intense work of Prynne's theological and political primary sources, accessible thanks to the EEBO (Early English Books Online) database of the University of Michigan.