By F. M. POWICKE

MANY years ago a philosopher told me that he had
been reading Maitland's translation of Gierke on
medieval political thought. He expressed delight and
astonishment in the discovery that people in the Middle
Ages were interested in such matters; and he added: 'I
found there attempts to face all the big problems which
have been bothering me.' On the other hand, a history
tutor complained to me, a little while ago, that he found
great difficulty in helping his pupils to read Locke intelli-
gently, because they did not relate his thought to anything.
My friend said, indeed, with pardonable exaggeration:
'It is not only that they don't see why Locke should refer
to the Scriptures; they don't know what the Scriptures
are.'

The six lectures printed in this little book cover in
part the same ground and they deal in the same kind of
way with medieval political thought as Professor d'En-
tréves's two books on medieval political philosophy and
on Hooker; but they were given in English by an
Oxford man with particular regard to the needs of an
Oxford audience, whose acquaintance with the history of
political thought is generally confined to selections from
the writings of Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
A systematic survey of medieval thought, with its vast and
perplexing literature, would be quite out of place in a
book of this kind, primarily intended for readers who
have little or no acquaintance with the history of the
West between the age of St. Augustine and the age
of Bodin and Hooker. Professor d'Entréves has, very

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