"This book reinterprets the great medieval thinker, Marsilius of Padua, who is conventionally considered to be ahead of his time as the first secular political theorist, the first post-classical thinker to espouse republicanism, and a scholastic precursor of the republican humanists of the Renaissance. George Garnett overturns this widely accept view, and attempts to advance the first truly historical interpretation of Marsilius's thought."--Jacket.