The largest work yet to join the library: Ten Books of Politics, the Politicorum libri decem of Adam Contzen, S.J., complete in English for the first time.
Contzen, professor of Sacred Scripture at Mainz, dedicated the work to the Emperor Ferdinand II. A complete Catholic doctrine of government set against Machiavelli, it so impressed Maximilian I of Bavaria that he made its author his confessor. Its ten books take the commonwealth from its causes to its defense: the efficient cause, matter, form, and kinds of the commonwealth; the religion to be maintained in it; the virtues it requires; the education of youth; laws; ecclesiastical magistracy; civil magistracy; the power of the state; the internal evils that threaten it; and war. Through three hundred and thirty-eight chapters Contzen draws on Scripture, the Fathers, the philosophers, the historians, and the laws of the Empire and of Rome.
The translation follows the second, enlarged edition (Cologne, 1629), with the dedicatory epistle to the Emperor, the approvals and imperial privilege, and the author’s catalogue of the writers he cites. The work may be read online chapter by chapter, or downloaded as a PDF for each of the ten books and as a single EPUB of the whole.