Cambridge University Press -- Looks well done - Woolf gives high marks for linking the interest of various players, including monarchs, with shifting ideologies and challenges of articulating a legal system that made sense with English ambitions, relations with other European colonial enterprises, and England's peculiar legal framework and its interactions with government - e.g. why the most elaborated jurisprudence, the Spanish, didn't fit with Fortescue commonwealth style thought and ticklish question of "conquest" -- downloaded pdf to Note

The Birth of Territory interrogates texts from various dates to see if they describe rule as the legal control over a determined space. Time after time we learn that a set of political writings that concern land, law, terrain, sovereignty, empire, or related concepts do not articulate a fully-fledged notion of territory. We may end up asking like the proverbial kids in the back of the car: “Are we there yet.” Elden is certainly able to show that earlier formulations are reworked in later periods, as with the discussion of Roman law in the medieval period; there is a lot in the political thought of each period, however, that relates to land and power but does not get reworked in later times. This means that what really holds many of the chapters together is that they are studies of how land and power were discussed at that time, and that is not so very far from taking land and power as quasi-universals. In fact, there is probably a continuum between categories that have greater or lesser historical specificity, rather than there being a clear distinction between the two. Yet, I must admit that this singular focus gives a welcome coherence to the book for all that it seems to discard large parts of the exposition as not required for later chapters. -- see review for Elden views on Westphalia and HRE contra Teschke ; review references classic and recent works on geography, terrain, law,mapping

JSTOR: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Mar., 1973), pp. 119-120

JSTOR: The English Historical Review, Vol. 87, No. 344 (Jul., 1972), pp. 581-582

JSTOR: Speculum, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Apr., 1964), pp. 207-228 -- downloaded pdf to Note

Citation: Stacey, Peter. “The Sovereign Person in Senecan Political Theory.” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 2, no. 2 (June 1, 2011): http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/98......Downloaded pdf to Note.......

After observing how the allegorical terms of the relationship between the prince andFortuna are established in resoundingly Senecan terms in Petrarch’s moral and political thought, I turn to investigate how the account subsequently becomes even more embroidered by Florentine humanists....... One aspect of Machiavelli’s assault on the prevailing contentions of the ideology of the Renaissance prince is a systematic and highly subversive reorganization of a set of concepts with which it had become conventional to map out the terms of that relationship. An integral part of this work is the brilliant reconfiguration of the Petrarchan—and ultimately Senecan—imagery with which the traditional relationship had been portrayed;