ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the medieval origins of certain modern ideas with great significance for international relations. In terms of international law, there is of course a very different claim which is increasingly influential. Thomas Franck has argued that international law is better understood as a system of rules rather than as law properly so-called, rules that link function and legitimacy. Gillespie's narrative suggests that the 'standard story' often told in International Relations scholarship about the origins of modern international relations is, deeply flawed. Gillespie's argument makes unambiguously clear the extent to which modern international relations - and indeed a good deal of politics in general - is effectively a hybrid between a system built on will and artifice, yoked together with a rhetoric that effectively assumes the older 'realist' transcendent conception of reality. Medieval studies become not just a crucial part of understanding our history, but a central part of our current predicament and attempts to understand and confront it.
