ARE THERE ANY INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS OR ONLY DUTIES? On the Limits of Obedience in the Avoidance of Sin according to Late Medieval and Early Modern Scholars

Abstract

In a collection of essays dedicated to medieval and early modern ideas on individual rights this contribution seeks to examine certain texts of the Middle Ages that reveal various and sometimes incompatible ways of dealing with ius/iura. There is a problem inherent in the tracing of rights theories from the Middle Ages to modern times: one can choose to observe either antitheses or complementarities. This paper focuses on antitheses because there are different medieval traditions of rights discourse, that of civil lawyers, that of theologians, to name only two.¹ From within the later thirteenth-century scholastic theological tradition, this paper attempts to chart one dominant attitude to iura that seems to place special emphasis on duties, simultaneously downgrading rights without altogether abolishing them in the domain of civil law.