And so
modern accounts of ancient ‘republicanism’,
which are so influential in modern
images of ancient citizenship, often bear a
striking resemblance to the self-styled
republican political theories of writers in the
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Ancient Citizenship and its Inheritors
DAVID BURCHELL
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Northern Italian Renaissance (c. 1400–1600),
or the Dutch Revolt (c. 1570–1650), or the
English Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s.
Finally, it was inevitable that early modern
revivals of ancient ‘republicanism’, and the
images of ‘active’ citizenship which went
along with them, were refracted through the
violent religious controversies of the epoch.
It is impossible to understand the republicanism
of the Dutch Revolt, or of the
English Revolution, for instance, without
recognising that they were products of
distinctive and specific Protestant religious
cultures.