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This chapter examines John Case's Aristotelian commonwealth as a form of monarchical republicanism. It analyzes Case's Sphaera Civitatis, a commentary on Aristotle's Politics that offered an Elizabethan conformist Aristotelianism that plotted a course between the more absolutist theories of Jean Bodin and the republican sympathies of Carlo Sigonio and Piero Vettori. Using a distinction between the form of sovereignty and the administration of government probably drawn from Bodin, Case argued that England was a monarchy with a broad-based administration. The chapter also considers Case's account of citizenship and the distribution of office as social stratification, his rejection of the idea of England as a society of orders, his vision of hierarchy, his treatment of citizenship, and his understanding of magistracy.

Although music was part of the recognized curriculum — the University had awarded degrees in music since the late fifteenth century — history, modern languages, and literature in the vernacular were generally considered supplements to formal university education. Early historical publications included Henry Savile's edition of Tacitus, histories of the university and its collections, and a life of King Alfred; the later publishing programme was dominated by Clarendon's History of the Rebellion and the works of Thomas Hearne. Most of the works printed in Oxford in modern European languages were intended for elementary language teaching. The Press published some modern literature in Latin, but more often in English, notably Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Hanmer's illustrated edition of Shakespeare. The Press published a number of works on music theory, including John Case's Apologia Musices in 1588, but music types for printing scores were only acquired in 1672 and the quantity produced remained small.

In 1576 Louis Le Roy published a new and expanded edition of his translation of Aristotle’s Politics. In the late-sixteenth century, the starting point for academic political reflection remained the Politics, a text which underlined the importance of participation in the constitution. Although Bodin’s alternative concept of sovereignty was widely admired, many readers were troubled by Bodin’s political and religious ideas and wanted to preserve a role for the Aristotelian idea of political justice and for the Church. The effect was a revitalization of politics as an academic disciple or science, in which the civil community was examined alongside the Church. Leading figures in this process include John Case and Richard Hooker in England and Pierre Grégoire in France. In Emden, Johannes Althusius developed a political theory which he described as a reworking of Aristotle; he emphasized the concept of ‘consociation’ and used it to defend the sovereignty of the people. Henning Arnisaeus challenged Althusius’s claims, preferring to see sovereignty as divisible, shared in the Holy Roman Empire between the Emperor and the Princes, and requiring the use of arcana imperii or secrets of state. This chapter shows that the Aristotelian tradition remained important as a way of portraying a hierarchically organized political society as natural to human beings, but that in the wake of Bodin’s writing there was a shift in emphasis away from questions of virtue and distributive justice and towards a discussion of the nature of sovereign power.