The Decline and Rebirth of Biopolitics in Medieval Europe

There is a conspicuous absence of biopolitical themes, including the question of population, in Christian literature before Aristotle’s Politics was translated into Latin around 1260 by William of Moerbeke. Although it is true that the translation of this treatise did not immediately launch a full-blown biopolitical discourse in the Middle Ages, it is nonetheless through the reception of Aristotle’s Politics that biopolitical issues were incorporated, for the first time, in Christian reflections on politics since the decline of biopolitics in late antiquity. In this paper, the focus is on the first medieval Aristotelian treatise on politics, namely De Regno, written probably soon after the translation of Aristotle’s Politics in the 1260s and attributed usually to Thomas Aquinas. Unlike in Aristotle’s Politics, there are no reflections on the political significance of the size of population, let alone its regulation by marriage laws and birth control in De Regno. Yet the point is that Aquinas was the first among the Christian thinkers to even touch on the question of population as virtually the entire Christian tradition until him had remained silent about it.