Abstract
The early-modern resistance theories developed by Juan de Mariana, S.J. (1536-1624) and Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1548-1617), are less novel, and more consistent with Thomas Aquinas’s framework for tyrannicide in the De regno (c. 1267) than leading intellectual historians allow. This article makes the case that Mariana and Suárez clarify, refine, and develop Aquinas’s highly permissive and substantially vague writings on tyrannicide in rival ways. It demonstrates how medieval and ultimately Roman considerations of tyranny and tyrannicide remain present to the seventeenth-century thinkers who define so many modern ideas about rights of revolution, sovereignty, and the relationship between Church and state.