The idea of the state of nature was a fundamental way for early modern thinkers to make sense of the emergence of the political.[875]

With the help of this concept thinkers explained how complex political societies could arise from anarchic multitudes of human beings and how legal frameworks that regulated citizens' relationships between one another could emerge.

This chapter argues that early modern narratives of the emergence of politics had a gendered dimension at their core. The chapter focuses on Thomas Hobbes's famous account of the process of ‘state-building' from a state of nature, and reads this in its broader context of early modern Roman law discourse. This shows that early modern thinkers did not conceive the polity as abstract and disembodied, as fleshless and sexless. Exploring this gendered dimension, and especially its relationship to ‘biology' as that which is still (although often very subtly) thought to drive the differences between ‘man' and ‘woman' in politics, makes clear that topics like the equality of man and woman, natural and civil marriages, child-birth, and breastfeeding were no apolitical concerns. Rather, these ‘private' matters were tightly enmeshed with the emergence and maintenance of the ‘public' and the political, and so they defy any clear-cut categorisations. Focusing on these matters, then, helps us to understand early modern ideas of politics and the state's raison d’etre, and leads us to re-examine inherent beliefs on the relationship of politics and gender, and the role of this relationship in our historical narrative.

Thomas Hobbes presents an apt starting point for the present enquiry since, with the exception perhaps of Machiavelli, no other early-modern author has attracted a comparably intense debate in feminist scholarship.^[880] Feminist and gender historians have identified as one of the most arresting features of Hobbes's theory that, in his works De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651), the author defended a radical equality of men and women in the state of nature, and denied that fathers had any natural dominion over children.

In De Cive Hobbes had written that ‘in the state of nature every woman that bears children becomes both a mother and a lord [domina]'.^[881] Mothers claimed this dominion, Hobbes wrote, since only mothers knew without any doubt that their offspring was theirs and, at least as importantly, mothers preserved their children's lives by (breast-) feeding them. Indeed, if a mother decided not to feed her child, she consequently lost her natural power over the infant, and this power went to anyone who took over the child's care. This was a most important point. While at first glance it seems that mothers are made lords over their children by the very act of giving birth, this seemingly natural and biological criterion was instantly qualified. A mother, Hobbes argued, could transfer her dominion in:

divers wayes; first, if she quit and forsake her right by exposing the child. He therefore that shall bring up the childe thus exposed, shall have the same dominion over it, which the Mother had. For that life which the Mother had given it (not by getting, but nourishing it) she now by exposing, takes from it.^[882]

Abandoning her children, Hobbes stated, was a mother's prerogative:

by the right of nature; for as much as they who have the supreme power (summum imperium), are not tyed at all to the civill lawes. Adde also that in the state of nature it cannot be known who is the Father but by the testimony of the Mother; the child therefore is his whose the Mother will have it, and therefore hers; Wherefore originall Dominion over children belongs to the Mother, and among men no lesse than other creatures: The birth followes the belly (Partus ventrum sequitur).^[883]

That Hobbes understood the natural rights of mothers as supreme power, summum imperium, and that he included in this supreme power a mother's right to abandon her child, has generated a great deal of attention in feminist scholarship. Many commentators find Hobbes's understanding of women in the state of nature both compelling and unconvincing.

Situated in the background of this modern feminist debate - whether Hobbes was an anti-feminist or a proto-feminist - is Sreedhar's further state­ment that Hobbes's theory was ‘a blatant rejection of the dominant claim, advanced by Hobbes's contemporaries, that child rearing is a woman's duty - or her fate'.^[885] On this point most commentators on Hobbes's theory, whether gender historians or mainstream political scientists, agree: Hobbes's view on the power of women in the state of nature was innovative and very different from ‘traditional' approaches to hierarchies in the family.^[886] Rarely, however, are we informed in detail about what exactly these traditional ideas were, even if it is sometimes acknowledged that early modern notions of gender were complex.^[887] Generally it appears that Sir Robert Filmer - whose political thought otherwise is often seen as a historical footnote - is taken at face­value in his approach to the parent-child relationship, and serves as the blue­print for the ‘traditional' approach of the entire pre-modern era.

Filmer had argued in his Observations on Mr Hobs Leviathan that Hobbes was absolutely wrong to claim equality of human beings in the state of nature. Filmer also took issue with the idea of natural maternal dominium over children.

It is said by Mr. Hobs... the Mother originally hath the government of her

Children, and from her the Father derives his right, because she brings forth and first nourisheth them.

Regarding Hobbes's argument that only mothers knew without doubt the paternity of their children, he replied that it was ‘not at the will of the mother to make whom she will the Father'.^[889]

The Observations were completely in tune with the argument Filmer put forth in Patriarcha (written around 1630, first published in 1680), where he laid down his conviction that with creation God had instituted a natural and unquestionable inequality between the sexes. Filmer thought that Adam was the first monarch, and ‘not only Adam but the succeeding patriarchs had, by right of fatherhood, royal authority over their children'.^[890] Filmer's view, however, was heavily contested; most famously by John Locke in the first of his Two Treatises of Government (1684). The idea that paternal power was absolute, and that royal power directly derived from paternal power, was nothing less than ridiculous for Locke. ‘There was never so much glib Nonsence put together in well sounding English', he remarked in the preface to the Two Treatises.^[891]

Amazement about the fact that a seventeenth-century thinker could pro­claim women's natural equality to men, and argue that mothers, not fathers, had summum imperium in their children, is a reaction of the twentieth and twenty-first rather than of the seventeenth century. We simply assume that all early modern thinkers must have put forward the argument that there was a natural absolute subordination of all kinds of women to all kinds of men. Similarly, the idea that a woman might abandon her child according to her own will, rather than having a natural and a biological urge to care for this child, and the idea that a parent-child relationship can be fostered by the simple act of feeding the child, which so resolves all notions of natural affinities, might not have been as shocking to the seventeenth-century reader as it appears to us.

A first example for my claim is the outrage that was expressed when the French writer Jean Bodin, himself trained in the Roman law, proclaimed all­encompassing paternal power the pillar of his theory of absolute government. In his Six livres de la Republique (1576), still today considered to be the foundational work on the notion of sovereignty and absolutism, Bodin had stated that it was a universal natural and divine law that a father had summum imperium ius and even patria potestas over his wife and children, including the right to decide over his dependents' life and death.^[892] In a scathing answer to Bodin, written in the context of his commentary on Aristotle's Politics from 1587, the Italian scholar and politician Antonio Montecatini accused Bodin of having confused in this matter legal categories. Patria potestas, the father's power over his children, Montecatini showed, was a matter of civil law, not of ius naturale or ius gentium. Montecatini paraphrased the Institutiones of Justinian, in which one could read that the potestas over children was ‘a right peculiar to Roman citizens, since there are no other men who have such power over their children as the one we have'.^[893] Indeed, Roman patria potestas, for Montecatini, was ‘plain tyranny'. It had developed with and in Roman civilisation, but it had nothing to do with nature, and it certainly was ‘not in use by any other peoples'.^[894]

As part of his extensive attack against Bodin, Montecatini referred to the fifth book of Plato's Republic and repeated Socrates' analogy that in watch­dogs ‘the females in the same way as the males (foeminae aeque ac mares)' care for the flock.^[895] Plato had used this analogy to emphasise a foundational equality between men and women, and Montecatini here used this to the same effect. Montecatini also stressed that the Decalogue commanded the individual to honour father and mother, and from this he drew the conclusion that naturally both parents had imperium and potestas over their children.^[896] These were ‘natural laws' that were unchanging. On the other hand, the dissimilarities and disparities that were observable in the diverse customs and laws instituted amongst different peoples, ‘change more than once'.^[897] The way that Montecatini framed the issue of equality and the natural right of parents over their children as a matter of law resembled in its breadth sixteenth­century commentators on the Roman law. Indeed, one of the most famous of those, Franqois Connan, Montecatini had quoted - unfavourably - in this passage. In the sixteenth century jurisconsults had commented on the Roman systematic division of private law into natural law, ius gentium, and civil law by drawing up immense meditations on the origins of justice, intricately inter­woven with the development of humankind itself, from the most natural condition of human beings to that of civilised Romans in the sphere of the res publica. The commentators span together precepts from theology, argu­ments from ancient philosophy, and anthropological and historical narratives and so created a powerful story of origins that had dimensions that were both systematic and historical.

Since these were origin stories, the first title of the first book of Justinian's Digest - ‘Concerning Justice and Law' - was carefully examined. This book begins with the division of law into public and private law and the threefold division of the latter naturalibus praeceptis aut gentium aut civilibus. Commentators enriched this systematic presentation of the law with a histor­ical narrative of the development of human nature, from the origins to the creation of states. The Digest defined the natural law as:

that which nature has taught to all animals, for this law was not peculiar to the human race, but applies to all creatures. Hence arises the union of the male and the female which we call marriage; and hence are derived the procreation and the education of children; for we see that other animals also act as though endowed with knowledge of this law.^[898]

Matrimonium was also seen as an important part of the ius gentium, the ‘law of nations'. This was the law observed by all of humankind, that regulated the space between states and the relationship of those human beings that did not fall into the realm of civil law.^[899] Ius gentium could also be read as representing a stage in the development of humankind that catalysed the need for civil law and the political community. At the foundations of the legal system as well as at the imagined historical origins of justice and statehood stood marriage, matrimonium, the development of which commentators, consequently, saw as intricately interwoven with the emergence of states.

Commentators brought the Digest together with the classical narratives of the beginning of political life. One of the most important of these, for the sixteenth-century theorists, was Cicero's De inventione, written very early in the Roman's career. In this text Cicero imagined a time ‘when men wandered at random over the fields, after the fashion of beasts', in which ‘no one had ever seen any legitimate marriages'.^[900] Of course this seems to be at odds with the Digest, in which marriages were declared to be part of natural law, so commentators set out to resolve this inconsistency. In this they themselves were part of a long tradition. In the thirteenth century, in his commentaries to the Sentences, Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) had wondered ‘whether matri­mony was natural', and he had particularly paid attention to the idea that according to natural law human beings shared marriage and the act of procreation with animals. This Thomas solved by asserting that human marriage, while indeed natural, was nevertheless different from that of animals, since it involved virtue and adherence to the good of the children. It was in this context that he discussed De inventione, in which he held Cicero to have put forward that ‘at the beginning men were savages and then no man knew his own children, nor was he bound by any marriage tie'. Thomas argued that:

the assertion of Cicero may be true of some particular nation, provided we understand it as referring to the proximate beginning of that nation (gens) when it became a nation distinct from others; for that to which natural reason inclines is not realized in all things, and this (Cicero's) statement is not universally true, since Holy Writ states that there has been matrimony from the beginning of the human race.^[901]

Thomas here did not deny outright the Ciceronian narrative, but he preferred to situate it at a very precise point in time and in a very precisely imagined place, in which such a situation of dispersed people without mar­riage-ties might have existed. Thus he portrayed this condition not as universal and natural, but rather as a ‘cultural' matter. It was in this tradition that the lawyer Franqois Connan, pupil of Andrea Alciato, managed to combine the Ciceronian claim that human beings had originally lived isolated lives, with the Roman law precept that marriage was a fundamental part of human nature. He wrote in his commentary on ‘What is the ius gentium according to Ulpian' that ‘the ius naturale refers properly to the solitary man, leading his life in the fields with his wife and children'.^[902] The ‘solitary' man, therefore, was not doing his roaming on his own. In the legal tradition, he was already situated and envisaged within the framework of a family.

With this in mind, Hobbes's state of nature, in which human beings are dispersed, without government, yet randomly assembled into sorts of families, appears to be very close to sixteenth-century commentaries on the natural law and the law of nations. Regarding the state of nature, Hobbes famously wrote that:

It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner...^[903]

This seemed to be an inconsistency, and on this Hobbes indeed was attacked by Filmer. While Hobbes declared human beings in the state of nature as leading completely independent lives (fungorum more), the example he gave was one of human beings organised into families.^[904] This, however, was not inconsistent; it rather was completely in line with the logical reasoning of his forerunners.

Just as Hobbes would do later, sixteenth-century lawyers imagined that matrimonium existed under ius naturale and ius gentium only in a basic form. They termed these natural marriages, just as Cicero had in De inventione, ‘unjust' or ‘illegitimate' (matrimonium injustum or illegitimum). This did not mean that these marriages were morally wrong or not allowed; on the contrary the ius gentium existed partly to permit them, as we shall see. But they were not codified as civil law. Children from these relationships, accordingly, were filii naturales, natural sons or daughters, or indeed illegitimi, illegitimates. Nevertheless, illegitimate marriages held important points in common with civil marriages. Both were consensual and both had not only simple procre­ation as their end, but equally the care for and education of children, as reason dictated it and to which nature impelled human beings.^[905] Under ius naturale and ius gentium illegitimate marriages were held to establish kinship via the mother. As the famous lawyer Ulrich Zasius taught his students in the southern German university of Freiburg in the sixteenth century: ‘the law of nature does not recognise agnatio'.^[906] That is, it did not recognise relationships via the father. Through natural law children were legally related to their mother only. In his exposition to De verborum significatione, the lawyer Jean Breche (1501-61) wrote that the legitimate, that is, the Roman civil family, indeed ‘follows the father', but ‘for all the rest, as far as origins are concerned, it is commonly established that children follow the mother. He who has no legitimate father derives his origin from his mother, which should be reckoned from the day on which he was born'.^[907] Commenting on the same passage, Andrea Alciato (1492-1550) also specified that, while it was a general rule of Roman civil law that children ‘followed the father', this did not mean that the civil law in general could not rule otherwise and establish ‘a special grant' which made the mother have power over the children: such was the case with the people of Delphi, of Pontus, and of Troy, ‘where it was proper... that children born from a foreigner and his wife follow the mother' (that is, they were to become citizens of the mother's polity).^[908]

That the ius naturale and the ius gentium provided that children were held to ‘follow the mother' did not, however, necessarily establish the mother's potestas over her children. Claudius Cantiuncula (1490-1549), professor in Basel and Vienna (and the author of the first German translation of Thomas More's Utopia), when discussing patria potestas in his Paraphrases Digesta, acknowledged that potestas was part of the civil law only, and hence could derive only from nuptiae iustae. ‘For neither mother nor father hold the natural and illegitimate children in potestas’.^[909] This was only logical. The ius gentium was used in Roman law specifically to clarify the marriage relations in cases of intermarriage between Romans and citizens of other nations or gentes. Only Romans possessed connubium, the right to just marriages. The ius gentium established that, if a Roman citizen married a non-Roman, the offspring was not considered a Roman citizen. Therefore patria potestas did not apply, and the children had to ‘follow the mother'. What exactly her civil law state vis-à-vis the offspring was, was of no concern to the Romans, because it was of no concern to Roman civil law. In what sort of relationship she held her children was an issue of her gens and their civil law; this was the meaning behind Cantiuncula's affirmation that the ius gentium did not establish power-relationships. What mattered was that it was not agnatio, the relationship via the male line, that was established in both ius gentium and ius naturale, but cognatio, the relationship via the mother. The conclusions from this obviously had repercussions not only for children born in the Roman empire of late antiquity to parents who did not have connubium but for early modern European communities dealing with children born out of wedlock in general. When Zasius wrote the reformed Stadtrecht (the civil law) of the city of Freiburg, he followed the rule that illegitimus partus semper matrem sequitur and laid down the decree that all illegitimate children should have the right to inheritance from the mother.^[910]

At this point we might draw a partial conclusion. Hobbes was not so very different from his contemporaries. Rather, he was part of a contemporary Roman law tradition, in that he only saw relationships via the mother estab­lished in the state of nature. That he granted mothers summum imperium ius, however, was indeed a turn from this tradition that affirmed that potestas could only derive from just marriages, not from natural ones. Aristotelians like Montecatini, on the other hand, half a century earlier than Hobbes, had defended something similar, when they argued that both mothers and fathers naturally shared potestas over their children (and the household as a whole). Seen in this context, Hobbes, defending male and female natural equality, was not so novel, after all. Certainly, the law precept that a natural child matrem sequitur, follows his or her mother, rather than the father, was indeed a cornerstone of the ius naturale and ius gentium.^[911] It was almost impossible to deduce from the foundations of Roman law a right of life and death of the father over his children or his wife as a natural right. Jean Bodin, who had argued that patria potestas was a natural and universal law, and who envisaged it as being pivotally deriving from the husband's summum imperium over his wife, was not defending a traditional or a standard view. Rather than being part of a tradition, he can be seen as its founder. Similarly, Filmer's attack on Hobbes was not so much a defence of the status quo against an innovator but rather the opposite: an ‘invention of tradition' and a very powerful one at that. Taken together, these different strands of ‘tradition', or ‘context' show that Hobbes was part of a long-standing, nuanced, and complex debate, that not only raised a wide range of very different questions and problems, but also provided extremely diverse and divergent answers.

We will now turn to a further, seemingly very ‘innovative' point regarding Hobbes's characterisation of the role of women in the state of nature, namely the issue of the rights of mothers to abandon their children. Hobbes had stated that it was a mother's prerogative in the state of nature to decide whether she wanted to raise a child or expose it, and that in the latter case the right over the child could be acquired by the person who fed it. Similar issues were also extensively discussed by early modern lawyers. In his lectures, Zasius had taught his students that the law of nature obliged parents to care for their children, but mothers and fathers were supposed to do so in different ways. Under natural law ‘the father is not held to feed the offspring in the first three years, yet the mother nourishes it with milk'. Zasius quoted a massive array of law commentators, not least the famous medieval lawyer Baldus de Ubaldis, who had written in more detail about the issue of feeding children. Baldus's treatment included a closer look at the justification of the gendered parental division of labour involved in feeding (‘in the first three years the child is fed with milk. And therefore the mother nurses him from her breasts, because a man does not have milk'), at the supposed obligations of aristocratic mothers to breast-feed their children (not obligatory), and at the supposed duty of poor women to do so (also not obligatory if they lacked the ability).^[912] Zasius then wondered whether therefore under civil law the father could disinherit the child by simply choosing not to feed the child. It seemed that in that case a child would legally cease to be the father's offspring. ‘If the father killed such a child, this would not be punished as patricide, but the punishment would be accounted as simple homicide.'^[913] Zasius's treatment of the issue displayed ambiguity. He was not entirely convinced that the father could volitionally under civil law cease any obligation towards the child. But we see here that the issue was extensively discussed and that it was at least legally plausible that the parent-child relationship should be dependent on the issue of providing, and being provided with, food. It is striking that in these legal debates kinship relations were understood purely as a matter of obligation, not as a matter of biology.

While of course abandonment was not allowed under canon law - and, from the third century on, not under Roman civil law either - it was still widely mentioned and discussed in medieval and early modern glosses and commentaries on the law. Thereby the kind of power that ‘biological' parents had over their children was centrally debated. In the fourteenth century, Johannes Andreae, for example, made clear that the crime of abandonment destroyed all paternal power.⁴⁰ Earlier, in the thirteenth century, Accursius had stated that a father who did not provide food for his child lost all paternal power, including the right to reclaim the child.⁴¹ Feeding and not feeding, especially nursing or not nursing, brought and took away obligations to and from a child. Roman parenthood, as depicted in the law, was not about biology. It was a legal and social institution, to be entered deliberately, as the normalcy of the concept of adoption shows, and which could also exited voluntarily. The avid discussion of these topics in medieval and early modern Europe shows that this was still - at least partly - relevant for its societies, in which the issue of the abandonment of children was of course a problem.⁴² With the focus on this legal tradition, we can also conclude that Hobbes did not look so very different from the Roman law tradition and its early modern commentators. Hobbes was rather part of an early modern tradition that was able to ponder parent-child relations free from moral considerations or from the evocation of motherly sentiments.

ad mores civiles, licet non quo ad naturam, quia iura agnationes non tolluntur; quod adeo verum est, ut si pater talem filium occideret, non puniretur ut parricida... sed poenam simplicis homicidii incidisset.'

⁴⁰ Johannes Andreae, In quinque decretalium libros novella commentaria x.5.11.1. v. liberatus, quoted in Charles J. Reid, Power Over the Body, Equality in the Family: Rights and Domestic Relations in Medieval Canon Law (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004), at 86, 248 n. 165.

⁴¹ Accursius, Glossa in Codicem. 8.46.9, v. consulta (Turin: Ex officina Erasmiana, 1968), 263va, quoted in Reid, Power Over the Body, at 86, 248 n. 169.

⁴² See Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001); Catherine Panter-Brick and Malcolm T. Smith, Abandoned Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

In light of the early modern idea of the emergence of civil government and its relationship to marriage, then, we might now consider afresh an important point that Carol Pateman has made in the Sexual Contract. In this extremely influential work Pateman argued that Hobbes was not consistent when he proclaimed natural equality of the sexes while claiming that states were founded by fathers. The passage in Leviathan which attracted Pateman's scrutiny reads: ‘In Commonwealths, this controversie [over children] is decided by the Civill Law, and for the most part, (but not alwayes) the sentence is in favour of the Father; because for the most part Common­wealths have been erected by the Fathers, not by the Mothers of families.'^[914] For Pateman it simply did not make sense that women would contract themselves to a commonwealth, in which they are subordinated to men, and in which they lose this right over their children. Since Hobbes had described mothers as having dominium, and thus immense power over their children, and since mothers were the only kinds of people in the state of nature who were able to have natural allies with obligations to them, since their children were bound to their mothers in gratitude for having been kept alive, why should women enter a civil state in which all these powers were taken from them? Pateman's solution was that Hobbes must have envisioned a state of nature as a state of war of men against women, turning women into slaves before the state was being contracted, so that women were not part of the multitude of free persons that contracted the commonwealth.^[915] However, looking at Hobbes in the context of early modern legal scholarship it becomes apparent that Hobbes did not leave a logical gap in his account of the emergence of civil life, and that he had not been as illogical as Pateman (and a cohort of scholars following her) made it seem. Neither had he been particularly brief or evasive in his account of the role of women in the emergence of civil government from a state of nature. As we have seen, Hobbes assumed a mother's right over her children in many ways more powerfully than his forerunners. Nevertheless, like the Roman law commen­tators, he understood this issue as pertaining to a pre-civic state, similar to how early modern commentaries saw the ius gentium.^[916] The ius gentium, according to the Digest, meant - besides the introduction of marriages - the introduction of wars, and thus fear, the passion that Hobbes most urgently identified as a reason to contract one's natural freedom away to a greater body. This immense right of mothers was thus only possible in a non-regulated sphere, before and between states, that was too insecure for anyone, even for mothers with potential allies in their children, to not try to escape it. From both the account of the origins of civil law and from his knowledge of history Hobbes also knew that it was a historical fact that men, and indeed ‘fathers', had founded states. And he was able to ascertain historically that civil law had established patria potestas in the case of the Romans, a law that was later deemed tyrannical. It was thus a historical, but not a logical, let alone a natural, outcome that women were subordinated by the civil law. When Hobbes wrote that ‘fathers more than mothers' were the founders of states, he indicated that state-building was not necessarily and systematically a bio­logically determined masculine or paternal endeavour. The Amazonian polity was a case in point and Hobbes, who mentioned female rulers very often, had no objections to a female monarch.

Hobbes was not as strikingly different to his contemporaries and forerunners as modern readers assume him to be. There had been a constant debate in Greek philosophy, in Roman jurisprudence and in medieval theology about what marriage was, and how it related to ideas of justice, and law, and in what way it was woven into what came to be ‘the state'. Hobbes can be seen to have delivered a contribution to this debate which was shaped and re-shaped during the centuries. After all, marriage was, in the Roman tradition, what Cicero had called the seminarium rei publicae, and in the Roman law tradition it signalled the beginning of justice. Medieval theology did not put the focus predomin­antly on God's punishment after the Fall damning Eve to subordination. Rather medieval theologians thought marriage could be understood as con­sensual, as a union affected by mutual help and care. Indeed, in the writings of medieval lawyers, philosophers and theologians, we find a language that saw husband and wife as aequales ^[917] This was brought together with the Roman law, which also understood marriage as a union in which the two partners ‘share the same civil rights'.^[918] In the Aristotelian tradition, the household was the space in which speech and reason first differentiated the zoon politikon from other animals, and commentators emphasised that the conjugal couple lived in friendship and relative equality.^[919] This made for a medieval and early modern understanding of marriage that was very different from what is often assumed it must have been: one of absolute subordination of all women in all to all men. In the sixteenth century the reformation brought marriage com­pletely in the realm of the temporal and it was further discussed extensively.^[920] From our modern point of view, in which we assume that ‘pre-modern' people did not even think about an equality of sexes, Hobbes indeed seems very ‘innovative' when he assumed the natural equality of the sexes, but, seen in the tradition that I have sketched here, his point of view was more or less a standard stance. Essentialism, the idea that human beings are absolutely biologically determined to fulfil certain sex roles, is far more a tradition of a later natural law theory, that developed contemporaneously with Hobbes, admittedly, but that culminated with nineteenth-century ideas of evolutionist determinism. Today there is a rather worrying trend to view human behaviour through a lens of genetics that borders on a new predestinarianism. This, however, simply wasn't available to our early modern thinkers. Denying that political power had a gender was perhaps still possible for Hobbes, who said that ‘though Man be male and female, Authority is not' and likewise ‘authority does not take account of masculine and feminine'.^[921] This is, however, cer­tainly not possible for us now.