Review of Riccardo Saccenti’s Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016)

In this short monograph, Riccardo Saccenti surveys the various andcompeting interpretations of natural law and natural right from the lateMiddle Ages through the modern period. As “a survey,” the intention of thisbook is not so much to advance and defend a central thesis about natural law,but rather to paint a picture of how the various interpreters of natural lawhave responded to the most important primary texts (of Gratian, ThomasAquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and John Locke, for example)and to one another. One of the issues with which Saccenti is most concernedis the transition from the medieval understanding of natural law inspired byan Aristotelian concept of nature to a modern theory of natural individualrights. Where exactly does this transition begin and where is it more or lessconsummated? A reader of this book will be impressed by the complexity ofthis debate (among others) and the nuances of difference between itsparticipants. Saccenti’s account of it succeeds in exposing the folly of overlysimplistic readings of intellectual history that are ideologically motivated,and reminds us what a careful reading of primary and secondary sources canachieve