Sir Robert Filmer, his works in the context of seventeenth-century European political thought and his intellectual background.

RESEARCH OUTLINE

My research focuses on Sir Robert Filmer (1588-1653) and his works in the context of seventeenth-century European culture. My aim is to develop an interpretation of Filmer's place as a thinker and, more specifically, as a political writer that strongly deviates from the scholarly mainstream, where he is seen either as a narrow-minded representative of a patriarchal society or as a conventional absolutist or simplistically as the adversary of John Locke.

For this reason, I start my project with a detailed historiographical account of the principal scholarly interpretations of Filmer's ideas in order to show their failure to provide an accurate picture of the origins of his concepts and of the context in which he articulated them. In so doing, I set out my own perspective and I develop a distinct approach to the study of Filmer that will help to better grasp his philosophical strength.

The objective is to provide readers with a more thorough and complete analysis of Filmer both as an intellectual whose life and education were formed within a specific social, political, cultural background, and then as a late humanist philosopher whose writings were part of a European-wide network of ideas. My research will be based on a chronological approach to the study of Filmer so as to delineate the different phases of his life in connection with the formulation of his political ideas and, more generally, with his intellectual activity.

This is not to suggest that I embrace a kind of teleological grand narrative of a thinker's life and work as the methodological bedrock of my research. Rather a chronological approach is best suited to explore the changes and the continuities that marked Filmer's experience and career. The tempo of the story will slow down at certain stages, such as for the late 1620s-early 1630s or for the time of his imprisonment in the mid-1640s, where it is vital to pause and illuminate Filmer's ‘actions and thoughts'.

This way of dealing with the variety of sources available to me will inevitably experience not only breaks and blockages, but also sudden accelerations in the construction of a comprehensive analysis of Filmer and his work. Yet such a way of proceeding will not affect the general thread of continuity that informs and pervades my entire effort to provide a full and accurate picture of Filmer.

The keynote of my work is the attempt to reconsider the original place of Sir Robert Filmer in the political milieu of the late 1620s and 1630s and, subsequently, in the 1640s. Accordingly, I am interested in studying his writings as the outcome of specific controversies Filmer was engaged in and I also aim to present them as Sir Robert's own elaboration of different sources and theoretical languages. Moreover, I think it necessary to address that often neglected part of Filmer's oeuvre which focuses on important questions of early-modern European culture: marriage and the status of women, witchcraft, and usury.

To summarise, my project has three main goals. Firstly, I intend to try and cast new light upon some aspects of Filmer's circles of friends and his cultural milieu in Kent and London so as to illustrate in detail his family connections and his intellectual formation. Hence one of my tasks is to reconstruct his library so that I can ascertain what books he could consult and what sources he could make use of. Most importantly, one chapter of my thesis aims to establish the principal targets of Patriarcha in the late 1620s. In this sense, my research concentrates on Thomas Scott of Canterbury, who was Sir Robert's cousin, and his arguments on patriots and freeborn Englishmen. Thus, I claim that in writing his work Filmer had in mind Scott and the type of political language the latter employed to attack monarchy and absolute government.

Secondly, a crucial portion of my research analyses Filmer's ‘less-known' works such as In Praise of the vertuous wife (mid-1640s), An Advertisement to the Jurymen of England, Touching Witches (1653) , and Quaestio Quodlibetica (published in 1653, but written in the mid-1620s). In so doing, I hope to revisit some of the scholarly assumptions both on Filmer's ideas with regard to these subject matters and on his active role as an engaged European literate. In addition, I will set out a detailed textual study of these three tracts in order to elucidate Filmer's argumentative strength and his poignant outlook on highly debated issues such as the administration of the household and the interconnected relationships within it; the existence of witches and their prosecution; and, finally, the legitimacy of lending money with interest.

Thirdly, I would like to pay attention to one final aspect of Filmer's political doctrines. This is to say that I will endeavour to compare some of Filmer's absolutist principles with some of the ideas of a few sixteenth-century French writers amongst whom were Jean Bédé, Pierre de Belloy, Jean Bodin, Pierre Grégoire , and Claude de Saumaise. The central focus of this part of my thesis will be Filmer's concept of sovereignty in relation to that of these authors and in connection to the debates on the “three estates” and the critique of popular government that informed the republic of letters in the 1640s and 1650s in England and continental Europe too.

In conclusion, the common thread underlying my project is the attempt to posit Filmer, the man and the thinker, both in his local and in his European context as an active and original theorist whose knowledge was applied to theoretical debates on crucial political matters and, broadly speaking, to social issues alike. My intention is to highlight his literary role within the seventeenth-century cultural European milieu so as to delineate a more complete and accurate picture of his intellectual work in relation to the writings of other major literati.