Brill is publishing a new essay
collection on the history of rights.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The essays in this volume explore
the ways rights were available to those in the margins of society. By tracing
pivotal judicial concepts such as ‘right of necessity’ and ‘subjective rights’
back to their medieval versions, and by situating them in unexpected contexts
such as the Franciscans’ theory of poverty and colonization or today’s
immigration and border control, this volume invites its readers to consider
whether individual rights were in fact, or at least in theory, available to the
marginalized. By focusing not only on the economically impoverished but also
those who were disenfranchised because of disability, gender, race, religion or
infidelity, this book also sheds light on the relationship between the early
history of individual rights and social justice at the margins.
Contributors are: Wim Decock, Heikki Haara, Virpi Mäkinen, Alejandra Mancilla,
Julia McClure, Ilse Paakkinen, Mikko Posti, Jonathan Robinson, John Salter,
Pamela Slotte, and Jussi Varkemaa.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Virpi Mäkinen is Senior Lecturer
in Theological and Social Ethics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She
has published monographs and many articles on medieval and early modern
intellectual history, including Property Rights in the Late Medieval
Discussion on Franciscan Poverty (Peeters, 2001), and co-edited Transformations
in Late Medieval and Early-Modern Rights Discourse (Springer,
2006).
Jonathan Robinson, Ph.D. (2010) in Medieval Studies at the University of
Toronto, Canada. He currently acts as a lawyer and is the author of William
of Ockham’s Theory of Property Rights in Context (Brill, 2012).
Pamela Slotte is Associate Professor of Minority Studies at the Åbo Akademi
University, Finland. She is the co-author of The Juridification of
Religion (Brill, 2017) and co-editor of Revisiting the Origins
of Human Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Heikki Haara is Senior Lecturer
of Political History at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of Pufendorf’s
Theory of Sociability: Passions, Habits and Social Order (Springer,
2018).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Abbreviations
Introduction: Rights and Justice towards the Margins
Virpi Mäkinen, Jonathan Robinson and Pamela Slotte
PART 1: Rights and the Poor Law
1 Poverty and Need in the Fourteenth Century: Johannes Andreae,
Bartolus of Saxoferrato, and Baldus de Ubaldis
Jonathan Robinson
2 Poor and Insolvent: Debtor Relief in Alvarez de Velasco’s De
privilegiis pauperum (1630)
Wim Decock
PART 2: Rights, Duties and Justice
3 Inclination to Self-Preservation and Rights to Life and Body in
Samuel Pufendorf’s Natural Law Theory
Heikki Haara
4 The Right of Necessity: From Hugo Grotius to Adam Smith
John Salter
PART 3: Rights Beyond the Margins
5 Rights and Needs: Widows as a Protected Group in Christine de Pizan’s
Thought
Ilse Paakkinen
6 Can Animals Have Rights? Conrad Summenhart and Francisco de Vitoria
at the Margins of Rights Language
Jussi Varkemaa
7 Whether Heretics and Infidels Can Possess Dominion Rights? Late
Medieval and Early Modern Debates
Virpi Mäkinen and Mikko Posti
PART 4: Geopolitical, Global, and Contemporary Perspectives
at the Margins
8 The Darker Side of Rights in Global Intellectual History: an
Ambivalent Case of Franciscan Poverty
Julia McClure
9 Necessity Knows No Borders: the Right of Necessity and Illegalized
Migration
Alejandra Mancilla
10 “Rights, Not Charity!” On Vocabularies for Conceptualizing the Case
of Persons with Disabilities
Pamela Slotte
