Naturalisation of Power (1250-1600): Unravelling the Strategies of Legitimation

This volume explores through case studies how a political order ensures its legitimacy and endures over time. Among the diverse strategies used to legitimate a wide variety of actors, the book maintains that naturalization and naturalness play a role in understanding of premodern political culture.

Naturalization is defined by the authors as the process by which culturally specific worldviews, which are constructed socio-historically, come to be experienced as evident and natural. The book argues that the process was recurrent in structuring elements in late medieval political and Renaissance discourses. Those periods were significant in that they saw the emergence of the modern state, and the resulting challenge to the dynastic state.

While discourses of naturalization were first developed by rulers to ensure the sustainability of their lordship, the book outlines how they were gradually used by other groups and actors in political society wishing to legitimize their own actions and positions.