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ABSTRACT
This paper argues that Machiavelli's method, his inductive and comparative use of history and experience for political analysis, and his fashioning of historical-political analysis as ‘science’, played an important and still unrecognised role in his reception in the sixteenth century. It makes the case that Machiavelli's inductive reasoning and stress on historia and experientia offered a model for scientific method that open-minded sixteenth-century scholars, eager to understand, organise and augment human knowledge (scientia), could fit to their own epistemology. By focusing on the question of method—a crucial issue for sixteenth-century contemporaries—the paper offers more than a key to the understanding of Machiavelli's positive reception. It also helps in apprehending the crucial importance of Lucretius to Machiavelli's scholarship; the role of the late Renaissance fascination with historia in his reception; and the breadth of appropriation of his method exactly in the decades when anti-Machiavellianism became official politics all over Europe. These claims are sustained through the cases of Machiavelli's early translators and promulgators; the French legal humanists and historiographers; the Swiss, Italian and French scholars engaging with medicine, Paracelsism and astronomy; the authors of political maxims from all over Europe; and finally Francis Bacon.
Acknowledgements
I wholeheartedly thank the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Neulateinische Studien (Innsbruck) for its backing and intellectual support. I am also immensely grateful to J. G. A. Pocock for reading, commenting and rethinking my paper, and likewise to Lucio Biasiori for his valuable comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Herbert Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1940).
2 For an overview of the idea of Machiavelli's empiricism see Joseph V. Femia, The Machiavellian Legacy. Essays in Italian Political Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 26–39.
3 See Leonardo Olschki, Machiavelli the Scientist (Berkeley: Gillick Press, 1945). Olschki underlined the ‘scientific character’ of The Prince without much reflection on what it was supposed to mean. See also Leo Strauss's review article in Social Research 13 (1946): 121–4.
4 Butterfield, The Statecraft, 22–41, 57.
5 Butterfield, The Statecraft, 71.
6 Ibid., 80.
7 Ibid., 80–6.
8 See the beginning of chapter 2:
In the light of what has been said in previous chapters we may now examine the place of Machiavelli in the transition which is often described as the “rise of the inductive method”. By this is meant the modern insistence upon empirical data, the idea of grounding the sciences upon a firm basis of verifiable observations, the patient and assured promotion of knowledge by the collection, the collation, and the analysis of what we call facts. (Ibid., 59)
9 Olschki, Machiavelli the Scientist.
10 Butterfield, The Statecraft, 69. See also Donald R. Kelley, ‘Murd’rous Machiavel in France: A Post Mortem’, Political Science Quarterly 85 (1970): 545–59. Kelley claims in this early article
that the anti-Machiavellian backlash in sixteenth-century France stemmed not only from offended political and religious sensibilities but also from a clash between different modes of perceiving reality—not only from a doctrinal Kulturkampf but from a fundamental, though not always fully articulated, Methodenstreit. (559)
11 On Machiavelli's sixteenth-century reception see in general Adolph Gerber, Niccolò Machiavelli: die Handschriften, Ausgaben und Uebersetzungen seiner Werke im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert mit 147 Faksimile und zahlreichen Auszügen; eine kritisch-bibliographische Untersuchung (3 books in 1 volume) (Gotha: Perthes, 1913); Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and its Place in Modern History (London: Routledge and Paul, 1962 [1924]); Giuliano Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna del Machiavelli (Rome: Istituto Storico, 1965); idem, Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell età moderna (Bari: Laterza, 1995); Rodolfo De Mattei, Dal premachiavellismo all’antimachiavellismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1969), 123–312; Luciana Pieraccini, ‘Alcuni aspetti della fortuna di Machiavelli a Firenze nel secolo XVI’, Studi e ricerche 1 (1981): 219–70; Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli – the First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance (Oxford: OUP, 2005); Enzo Sciacca, Principati e repubbliche: Machiavelli, le forme politiche e il pensiero francese del Cinquecento (Florence: Centro Editoriale Toscano, 2005); Jacob Soll, Publishing the Prince. History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 1–40; Victoria Kahn, ‘Machiavelli's Afterlife and Reputation to the Eighteenth Century’, in Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. John M. Najemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 239–55; Francesco Bausi, Il ‘Principe’ dallo scrittoio alla stampa (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2015); Machiavelli Cinquecento. Mezzo millennio del Principe, ed. Gian Mario Anselmi et al. (Milan–Udine: Mimesis, 2015); Cornel Zwierlein, ‘French-Dutch connections: the transalpine reception of Machiavelli’, in Fruits of Migration, ed. C. Zwierlein and Vincenzo Lavenia (Leiden: Brill, [forthcoming]). For further bibliography see S. Ruffo Fiore, Niccolò Machiavelli: an Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism and Scholarship (New York: Greenwood, 1990).
12 Victoria Kahn, ‘Reading Machiavelli. Innocent Gentillet's Discourse on Method’, Political Theory 22 (1994): 539–60; idem, Machiavellian Rhetoric. From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton: University Press, 1994), esp. 106–19.
13 Although the reception of Machiavelli's method is present in her article (‘Machiavelli's afterlife’), in my opinion it is not sufficiently emphasised and refers only to the last decades of the century.
14 In many ways this tradition ran against the dominating interpretation of Machiavelli the republican thinker as in J. G. A. Pocock and others, which posited the divorce of rhetoric from politics. Among Kahn's many forerunners one needs to emphasise Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 62–80; and Nancy S. Struever, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).
15 See, for example, John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton: University Press, 1989), 35–71; Barbara Spackman, ‘Machiavelli and Maxims’, Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 137–55; John F. Tinkler, ‘Praise and Advice: Rhetorical Approaches in More's Utopia and Machiavelli's The Prince’, Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988): 187–207. See also note 12.
16 Luigi Zanzi, Il metodo di Machiavelli (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013). For a similarly positive overview of the idea of Machiavelli's empiricism see Joseph V. Femia, The Machiavellian Legacy. Essays in Italian Political Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 26–39. Cornel Zwierlein also takes Machiavelli's empiricism in his method of discorso seriously, and also sustains that this new tradition of discorrere had a significance in his reception, even among anti-Machiavellians. Cornel Zwierlein, Discorso und Lex Dei: die Entstehung neuer Denkrahmen im 16. Jahrhundert und die Wahrnehmung der französischen Religionskriege in Italien und Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). Andrea Matucci also stresses the novelty of Machiavelli's technique of discorrere but only from an Italian perspective. Andrea Matucci, Machiavelli nella storiografia fiorentina: per la storia di un genere letterario (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1991), 190–251; and idem, ‘La scrittua della storia nei “Discorsi” di Machiavelli’, in Langues et écritures (as in note 12), 87–102. Emanuele Cutinelli Rèndina, Jean-Jacques Marchand and Matteo Melera-Morettini argue against its novelty and point out its Tuscan origins: ‘Ipotesi per una ricerca. L’emergenza del discorso politico dalla storiografia toscana minore tra Quattro e Cinquecento’, in Langues et écritures de la Republique et de la guerre: etudes sur Machiavel, ed. Alessandro Fontana et al. (Genova: Name, 2004), 29–50. See in this regard also Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Pontano, Machiavelli and Prudence: Some Further Reflections’, in From Florence to the Mediterranean and Beyond Essays in Honour of Antony Molho, ed. Dioga Ramada et al. (Florence: Olschki, 2009), 117–25. On the other hand, many, like Kahn (Machiavellian Rhetoric and ‘Machiavelli's afterlife’) prefer to speak about Machiavelli's ‘rhetorical’—and not ‘scientific’—method. A more sceptical approach is by Sidney Anglo, Machiavelli: a Dissection (London: Paladin, 1971), 238–69.
17 C. Pincin, ‘Osservazioni sui modo di procedere di Machiavelli nei “Discorsi”’, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (Florence: Sansoni, 1971).
18 On sixteenth-century intellectual interest in method see Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958); Neal W. Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960); Angelo Crescini, Le origini del metodo analitico. Il Cinquecento (Udine: Del Bianco, 1965); Cesare Vasoli, La dialettica e la retorica dell’umanesimo: ‘Invenzione’ e ‘metodo’ nella cultura del XV e XVI secolo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968); Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities. Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986), 122–62; Philippe Desan, Naissance de la méthode (Machiavel, La Ramée, Bodin, Montaigne, Descartes) (Paris: Librairie A.-G. Nizet, 1987); Ann Blair, ‘Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: the Commonplace Book’, Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 541–51; Guido Oldrini, La disputa del metodo nel Rinascimento: indagini su Ramo e sul ramismo (Florence: Le lettere, 1997); Cesare Vasoli, ‘II Metodo e l’ordine del sapere’, Storia della scienza 4 (2001): 710–29; Ramus et l’Université, ed. Kees Meerhoff and Michel Magnien (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole normale superieur, 2004); Robert Goulding, ‘Method and Mathematics: Peter Ramus's Histories of the Sciences’, Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 63–85.
19 On Machiavelli's method in general see Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946); Federico Chabod, ‘Machiavelli's method and style’ [1955], in Machiavelli and the Renaissance (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1958), ch. 3; Desan, Naissance de la méthode; Anthony Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Zanzi, Il metodo di Machiavelli. See also notes 1 and 17–18.
20 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, trans. Ninian Hill Thomson (London: Kegan, 1883), 3. On the interpretation of the paratexts of the Discourses see among others Carlo Pincin, ‘Le prefazioni e la dedicatoria dei Discorsi del Machiavelli’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 143 (1966): 72–83; John M. Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton: University Press, 1993), 335–49 (esp. 338 on Machiavelli's allusions to Lucretius, Ovid and Dante with the image of ‘untrodden way’); Fabio Forsini, ‘“Dubitando non incorrere in questo inganno di che io accuso alcuni”: Storia, memoria, giudizio nelle prefazioni e nella dedicatoria dei Discorsi’, in Machiavelli: tempo e conflitto, ed. Riccardo Caporali et al. (Milan: Mimesis, 2013), 87–105; Paul Rahe, ‘In the Shadow of Lucretius: The Epicurean Foundations of Machiavelli's Political Thought’, History of Political Thought 28 (2007): 30–55 (at 48–9); Zanzi, Il metodo di Machiavelli, passim.
21 Machiavelli, Discourses, 3 (preface to the first book).
22 Pincin, ‘Le prefazioni’, 76; Jean-Jacques Marchand, Niccolò Machiavelli: i primi scritti politici (1499–1512): nascita di un pensiero e di uno stile (Padova: Antenore, 1975), 371–93 (esp. 378).
23 Translation by Tim Park in the new Penguin edition of The Prince (2011). Also see Discourses 1.53.12, 1.56.2.
24 Machiavelli, Discourses, 3 (preface to the first book).
25 On the Lucretian influence on Machiavelli see recently Rahe, ‘In the Shadow of Lucretius’; Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); idem, ‘Lucretian Naturalism and the Evolution of Machiavelli's Ethics, in Lucretius and the Early Modern, ed. David Norbrook et al. (Oxford: University Press, 2015), 69–90.
26 Machiavelli, Discourses, 21 (1.6.4).
27 Machiavelli, Discourses, 5 (preface to the first book). Also see chapter 1.2.
28 It is not the point if Machiavelli had a direct knowledge of Hippocratic or Galenic texts, which were increasingly known in his age. What matters here is that he could (and was) read in the light of these texts. See Zanzi, Il metodo del Machiavelli, 104–11, 218–38, 401–36, 847–98; Marie Gaille-Nikodimov, ‘A la recherche d’une définition des institutions de la liberté. La médecine, langage du politique chez Machiavel’, in Langues et écritures (as in note 12), 14–64; idem, Conflit civil et liberté: la politique machiavélienne entre histoire et médecine (Paris: H. Champion, 2004). Cf. Najemy, ‘Machiavelli and History’, 1142–3.
29 Machiavelli, Discourses, 125 (Book 1.39.) Cf. the preface to Book 2.
30 Although we may perceive a certain lack of coherence in his maintaining the constancy of human nature. John Najemy also discusses those places of the Discourses that seem to contradict Machiavelli's belief in the universality of human emotions and motives: John M. Najemy, ‘Machiavelli and History’, Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2014): 1131–64, at 1141–2. Cf. Zanzi, Il metodo del Machiavelli, 62–72. Also see Rinaldo Rinaldi, ‘Antichi e moderni’, in Machiavelli: enciclopedia machiavelliana (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 2014), 1:62–7.
31 See Machiavelli, The Prince, 2.26–8.
32 Machiavelli, Discourses, 125 (Book 1.39). Cf. also Book 3.43.
33 See Marchiand, Niccolo Machiavelli; Matucci, Machiavelli nella storiografia; Fredi Chiappelli, Studi sul linguaggio del Machiavelli (Florence: Le Monnier, 1957); idem, Nuovi studi sul linguaggio del Machiavelli (Florence: Le Monnier, 1969); Jean-Louis Fournel and Jean-Claude Zancarini, ‘Sur la langue du Prince: Des mots pour comprendre et agir’, in N. Machiavelli, Le Prince, ed. and trans. J.-L. Fournel, J.-C. Zancarini (Paris: PUF, 2000), 545–610; Diego Quaglioni, ‘Machiavelli e lingua della giurisprudenza’, in Langues et écritures (as in note 12), 176–92; Zanzi, Il metodo del Machiavelli, passim but esp. 331–77; Giuseppe Patota, ‘Stile’, Enciclopedia Machiavelliana 2: 733–43.
34 For his contemporary and early reception see Francesco Bausi, ‘“L’aureo libro moral”. Circolazione e fortuna del Principe’, in Machiavelli Cinquecento (as in note 11), 25–42; Najemy, Between Friends. See also note 11.
35 Najemy, Between Friends.
36 Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini; Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘Introduction’, in Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman (Ricordi), ed. Nicolai Rubinstein (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1970), esp. 19–26; John G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: University Press, 1975), 114–55, 219–71; Mark Phillips, Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian's Craft (Toronto: University Press, 1977); Raffaele Ruggiero, ‘Machiavelli e Guicciardini davanti alle leggi delle XII Tavole. Da Livio alle Considerazioni intorno ai Discorsi del Machiavelli’, in Text – Interpretation – Vergleich: Festschrift für Manfred Lentzen, ed. Joachim Leeker et al. (Berlin: Schmidt, 2005), 395–418. However, John Pocock argues that the contrast drawn between ‘Machiavelli's supposedly idealistic belief in historical parallels and recurrences [and] Guicciardini's supposedly more realistic understanding that no two situations are exactly alike’ has been overstated by Butterfield and others (The Machiavellian Moment, 268–9). Also see idem, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Three. The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 207–8.
37 Nevertheless, I argue that Nifo should not be the key example of the reception of an ‘Aristotelian’ Machiavelli, as in the works by Giuliano Procacci (Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna, 45–77, and idem, Machiavelli nella cultura, 63–83). Such reading is, of course, justified, since Aristotle was absolutely crucial to the sixteenth-century preoccupation with method; however, it is narrow and misleading. Although sixteenth-century followers of Machiavelli highly appreciated Aristotle and many recognised his legacy in Machiavelli's political thought, they may not be called ‘Aristotelians’ for that. They had a constructive but not uncritical relationship to Aristotle's philosophy, and, as we will see, generally gave preference to experience and reason over authority.
38 Note that Nifo had already published in 1521 a first (chiefly negative) reaction to Machiavelli's The Prince (Libellus de his quae ab optimis principibus agenda sunt) and that his De rege et tyranno of 1526 was still another reaction. On Nifo's reception of Machiavelli see Procacci, Machiavelli nella cultura, 63–71; Anglo, Machiavelli –The First Century, 42–84; Zwierlein, Discorso und Lex Dei, 107–17; Cornel Zwierlein, ‘Politik als Experimentalwissenschaft, 1521–6: Agostino Nifos politische Schriften als Synthese von Aristotelismus und Machiavellismus’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 113 (2006): 30–62; Bausi, ‘“L’aureo libro moral”’, 33–7. For Nifo see Ennio De Bellis, Bibliografia di Agostino Nifo (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2005); and the article on Nifo by Margherita Palumbo, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 78 (2013): 547–52; and by Paul Larivaille in Enciclopedia Machiavelliana, 2: 234–8.
39 See Anglo, Machiavelli – the First Century, 47–8.
40 Agostino Nifo, De regnandi peritia, ed. and trans. P. Larivaille, in Machiavel, Il principe / Le prince – A. Nifo, De regnandi peritia – L’art de régner (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2008), 220.
41 See, for example, Machiavelli's letter to Francesco Vettori, where he claimed he knew what Aristotle said about states but rather relied on his own considerations about future, present and past. Letter X, in N. Machiavelli, Lettere familiari, ed. Edoardo Alvisi (Florence: Sansoni, 1883), 295.
42 The greatest influence is of Book 5.10–11, but also see book 4, for example, Arist. Pol. 1288b20, and Arist. Rh. 1360a12–13, or Nic. Eth. 1104a. See Friedrich Mehmel, ‘Machiavelli und die Antike’, Antike und Abendland 3 (1948): 152–86; Dolf Sternberger, ‘Machiavellis Principe und der Begriff des Politischen’, in Herrschaft und Vereinbarung (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1980), 29–112; Manuel Knoll, ‘Wissenschaft und Methode bei Machiavelli. Die Neubegründung der empirischen Politikwissenschaft nach Aristoteles’, in Niccolò Machiavelli – Die Geburt des Staates, ed. Manuel Knoll and Stefano Saracino (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), 91–119; Paolo Falzone, ‘Aristotele’, Enciclopedia Machiavelliana 1: 94–100.
43 Anglo claims (Machiavelli – The First Century, 33) that ‘the rigorous application of Machiavelli's historical method, especially with regard to warfare, is a feature of Agostino Nifo's De regnandi peritia (1523)’ but does not elaborate upon it.
44 A. Nifo, Dilucidarium Augustini Niphi Suessani philosophi solertissimi. Metaphysicarum disputationum, in Aristotelis decem & quatuor libros Metaphysicorum (Venetiis: apud Hieronymum Scotum, 1559), 40b. See Zwierlein, ‘Politik als Experimentalwissenschaft’, 48–54 (esp. 50.)
45 Magni philosophi Augustini niphi medicis Suessani Expositio atque interpretatio lucida in libros artis Rhetorice Aristotelis (Venetiis: apud Hieronymum Scotum, 1537), 29v. See Zwierlein, idem, 54. Cf. with Lipsius's military scholarship analysed by Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Three, 276–95.
46 Niccolò Machiavelli, Il principe di Niccolo Machiavelli al Magnifico Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici (Florence: Giunta, 1532), iir. (The first edition appeared a few months earlier in Rome by Antonio Blado.) See Gerber, Niccolò Machiavelli: die Handschriften, 28. Giunta may well have been the person who provided Nifo with the manuscript of Machiavelli, see Bausi, ‘“L’aureo libro moral”’, 34–6.
47 The very first translation was by Jacques de Vintimille in 1546, which remained in manuscript. See Anglo, Machiavelli – The First Century, 192–4; N. Bianchi Bensimon, ‘La première traduction française du De Principatibus de Nicolas Machiavel’, in The First Translations of Machiavelli's Prince, ed. Roberto de Pol (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 25–57; Lucio Biasiori, Nello scrittoio di Machiavelli. Il Principe e la Ciropedia de Senofonte (Rome: Carocci, 2017), 84–5.
48 Nicolas Machiavelle, Le Prince, trad. Guillaume Cappel (Paris: Charles Estienne, 1553). On Cappel and his translation see Anglo, Machiavelli –The First Century, 194–8; Jean-Claude Zancarini, ‘“Et Favellar francese non gli spiace”. Sulle traduzioni francesi del Principe, XVI-XVII secolo’, in Machiavelli Cinquecento (as in note 11), 73–90. On his family see John Hearsey McMillan Salmon, ‘Protestant jurists and theologians in early modern France: the family of Cappel’, in Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 54–72. Although in the preface Cappel claims that he has meant his translation as a literary exercise before coming out with his own contribution to political literature, he probably realised the deficiency of his approach (which had ‘more zeal than order’, ibid., Aiiiiv) and that Machiavelli hardly left ‘anything for his successors either to add to or subtract from his work’ (ibid., Aiiiv). Curiously, The Prince remained practically his most significant publication, although much later he also edited Jean Fernel's collection of medical examples and left behind a short essay concerning dietary practice during the plague.
49 Machiavelle, Le Prince, Aiiv.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., Aiiiv.
52 Ibid.
53 On the influence of Machiavelli's French reception in the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire see Zwierlein, ‘French-Dutch connections’.
54 See Renata Pianori, ‘“Le Prince” de Gaspar d’Auvergne’, in Studi machiavelliani, ed. Facoltà di Economia (Padova: Giuliari, 1972), 83–101; Anglo, The First Century, 198–201.
55 The fact that Muret was a follower of Machiavelli is apparent not only from his pioneering contribution to the cult of Tacitus but also from his reaction to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572. See Gábor Almási, ‘Experientia and the Machiavellian turn in religio-political and scientific thinking: Basel in 1580’, History of European Ideas 42 (2016): 857–81, at 869.
56 Translation is by Anglo, The First Century, 199. The copy I used is a 1579 edition: Discours de l’estat de paix et de guerre de messire Nicolas Macchiavelli […] Ensemble, un livre du même auteur intitulé Le prince (Roven: Nicolas Lescuyer, 1979).
57 This is my interpretation. D’Auvergne's statement about necessary corruption (‘telle est la loy du monde, qui est naturellement vicieux’) comes earlier, while he continues the preface with a confused argument about God eventually authorising princes for seemingly evil actions.
58 On Gohory see Willis Herbert Bowen, ‘Jacques Gohory (1520–1576)’ (PhD Diss., Harvard University, 1935), which is still the most exhaustive work; Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols (New York: MacMillan, 1923–1958), 5:636–40; Enea Balmas, ‘Jacques Gohory, traduttore del Machiavelli (con documenti inediti)’, Studi machiavelliani, 1–53; Didier Kahn, ‘Le paracelsisme de Jacques Gohory’, in Paracelse et les siens (Paris: La Table d’Émeraude, 1996), 81–130; Anglo, The First Century, 204–25; R. Gorris Camos, ‘Dans le labyrinthe de Gohory, lecteur et traducteur de Machiavel’, Laboratoire italien 8 (2008): 195–229; Lucio Biasiori, ‘Islamic Roots of Machiavelli's Thought? The Prince and the Kitāb sirr al-asrār from Baghdad to Florence and Back’, in Machiavelli, Islam and the East, ed. Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 17–37.
59 Le premier et second livre de la première décade de Tite-Live de Padoue, trad. Jacques Gohori[!] (n.d.: Arnoullet, 1553), aa3v.
60 Nicolas Macchiavegli, Le premier Livre des Discours de l’Estat de Paix et de guerre, Aiiiir. The translation is based on Anglo, The First Century, 207–8.
61 On the ars historica literature in general see Herbert Weisinger, ‘Ideas of History during the Renaissance’, Journal of the History of Ideas 6 (1945): 415–35; Giorgio Spini, ‘The Art of History in the Italian Counter-Reformation’, in The Late Italian Renaissance, ed. Eric Cochrane (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 91–133; George Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Girolamo Cotroneo, I trattati dell’Ars Historica (Naples: Giannini, 1971); Astrid Witschi-Bernz, Bibliography of Works in the Philosophy of History, 1500–1800 (History and Theory, spec. no. 12) (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972); Arno Seifert, Cognitio historica: die Geschichte als Namengeberin der frühneuzeitlichen Empirie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1976); Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 479–87; Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1970); Robert Black, ‘The new laws of history’, Renaissance Studies 1 (1987): 126–56; Anthony Grafton, What was history? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Donald R. Kelley, ‘Between History and System’, in Historia. Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 211–37.
62 Fran. Balduinus, Ad leges de iure civili (Basileae: Opporinus, 1559), quoted by Kelley, Foundations, 119. On Baudouin see Michael Erbe, François Bauduin (1520–1573). Biographie eines Humanisten (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1978); Grafton, What was History?, 94–122; Enzo Sciacca, Umanesimo e scienza politica nella Francia del XVI secolo: Loys Le Roy (Florence: Olschki, 2007), 83–93.
63 F. Balduinus, De institutione historiae universae, et ejus cum jurisprudentia coniunctione (Parisiis: A. Wechel, 1561).
64 Ibid., 1.
65 Jean Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, ed., trans. and comm. Sara Miglietti (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2013). For a comprehensive bibliography see ibid., 50–8; for a general bibliography on Bodin see Marie-Dominique Couzinet, Jean Bodin (Paris: Memini, 2001); and https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/bodinproject/files/bodin_bibliography_oct2016.docx (accessed on January 17, 2018). For the similar concept of historia in Francesco Patrizi's Dialogues on History of 1560, see Cesare Vasoli, Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (Rome: Bulzoni, 1989), 25–108; Seifert, Cognitio historica, 63–72; Marie-Dominique Couzinet, ‘History and Philosophy in Francesco Patrizi's Dialoghi della istoria (1560)’, in Francesco Patrizi. Philosopher of the Renaissance, ed. Tomáš Nejeschleba and Paul Richard Blum (Olomouc: Palacky University Olomouc, 2014), 62–88.
66 See Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1963); Donald R. Kelley, ‘The Development and Context of Bodin's Method’, in idem, History, Law and Human Science (London: Variorum, 1984), 123–50; Couzinet, Jean Bodin; idem, ‘On Bodin's Method’, in The Reception of Bodin (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 39–66.
67 Bodin, Methodus, 350 (beginning of chapter 6).
68 Cf. Laurent Gerbier, ‘Une méthode pour interpréter les histoires: Machiavel et Jean Bodin’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 61 (2009): 151–66.
69 As we know, ten years later Bodin completely abandoned his good opinion of Machiavelli in the Republique. See John L. Brown, ‘The Major Themes of the Methodus’, in The Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem of Jean Bodin: A Critical Study (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1939), 113–16; Franklin, Jean Bodin.
70 On Le Roy see Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna, 50–65, 117–20; Werner L. Gundersheimer, The Life and Works of Louis Le Roy (Geneva: Droz, 1966); Sciacca, Principati e repubbliche, 145–227; idem, Umanesimo.
71 See his funeral epistle over the death of François Connan (a pioneer in humanist jurisprudence) in Denys Lambin, Loys Le Roy, Marc-Antoine Muret, Trium disertissimorum virorum praefationes ac epistolae familiares aliquot (Parisiis: apud Aegidium Maugier, 1579), 340–1.
72 Ibid., 343–4.
73 Loys Le Roy, Les Politiques D’Aristote (Paris: Vascosan, 1568). Aristotles politiqves, or discovrses of government. Translated ovt of Greeke into French, with expositions taken out of the best authours, specially out of Aristotle himselfe, and out of Plato, conferred together where occasion of matter treated of by them both doth offer itselfe: the obseruations and reasons where of are illustrated and confirmed by innumerable examples, both old and new, gathered out of the most renowmed empires, kingdomes, seignories, and commonweals that euer haue bene, and wherof the knowledge could be had in writing, or by faythfull report, concerning the beginning, proceeding, and excellencie of ciuile gouernment. By Loys le Roy, called Regivs (London: Adam Islip, 1598). See Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna, 57–65; Maria Elena Severini, ‘Il destino di un libro al servizio del sovrano: la Politica di Aristotele da Loys Le Roy a John Donne’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 74 (2013): 89–104.
74 See for example the historical essay inserted into the commentary on Florence, Genova, Siena in comparison with Venice, Le Roy, Les Politiques, 686–705. See also the full title above.
75 Ibid., 788–9. Cf. Gundersheimer, The Life and Works, 54–5.
76 Loys Le Roy, De l’origine, antiquité, progrès, excellence et utilité de l’art politique (Lyon: Benoist Rigaud, 1568).
77 Ibid., 33.
78 Ibid., cf. 28 on humours.
79 Ibid., 36.
80 Loys Le Roy, De la vicissitude ou variete des choses en l’univers et concurrence des armes et des lettres par les premieres et plus illustres nations du monde … (Paris: Pierre l’Huilier, 1575). In English translation: Of the interchangeable course, or variety of things in the whole world, trans. Robert Ashley (London: Charles Yetsweirt, 1594).
81 See Sciacca, Umanesimo, 99. It did not mean that Le Roy rejected history's essentially cyclical nature. For his ideas on progress Le Roy has often been seen as a spokesman of the moderns. See for example Herbert Weisinger, ‘Ideas of history during the Renaissance’, Journal of the History of Ideas 6 (1945): 415–35; David Wootton, The Invention of Science: a New History of the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper, 2015), 88.
82 Le Roy, Of the interchangeable course, 127r. (I modernised punctuation and spelling.)
83 Le Roy, De la vicissitude, 99r; Le Roy, Of the interchangeable course, 110.
84 Among others he believed that the expansion of the Roman Empire was an act of divine providence. See Sciacca, Umanesimo, 120.
85 Together with my observations, which rely on Carlos Gilly (see Almási, ‘Experientia’, 868), I think Zuliano's article sufficiently proves Castelvetro's authorship of the preface. Federico Zuliani, ‘Giacomo Castelvetro e Machiavelli. Appunti sulla conoscenza dell’opera e sull’edizione londinese dei Discorsi (1584)’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 53 (2011): 593–615.
86 Il prencipe di Nicolo Machiavelli: al Magnifico Lorenzo di Piero de Medici. Con alcune altre operette (Palermo [i.e. London]: Heredi d’Antoniello degli Antonielli [i.e. John Wolfe], 1584), *2v. English translation by Kahn, ‘Machiavelli's afterlife’, 243.
87 I am using the plural ‘editions’ since the 1580 edition had three different prints with changing prefaces. See Almási, ‘Experientia’.
88 On Perna see Peter G. Bietenholz, Basle and France in the Sixteenth Century (Geneva: Droz, 1971), passim; Antonio Rotondò, ‘Pietro Perna e la vita culturale e religiosa di Basilea fra il 1570 e il 1580’, in Studi e ricerche di storia ereticale italiana del Cinquecento (Turin: Giappichelli, 1974), 273–394; Carlos Gilly, ‘Zwischen Erfahrung und Spekulation. Theodor Zwinger und die religiöse und kulturelle Krise seiner Zeit’, Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde, 77 (1977): 57–137 and 79 (1979): 125–223 (passim); and Leandro Perini, La vita e i tempi di Pietro Perna (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2002). On Zwinger see Gilly, ‘Zwischen Erfahrung’ (now elaborated also in Italian as Theodor Zwinger e la crisi culturale della seconda metà del Cinquecento (2012), http://www.saavedrafajardo.org/ColeccionesBibliotecaSaavedraFajardo.aspx?col=gilly). On Stupanus see Huldrych M. Koelbing, ‘Johannes Nicolaus Stupanus, Rhaetus (1542–1621)’, in Äskulap in Graubünden, ed. Bündnerischer Ärzteverein (Chur: Calven-Verlag, 1970), 628–46; Almási, ‘Experientia’.
89 Ibid., 868.
90 Leone Suavio [Jacques Gohory], Theophrasti Paracelsi philosophiae et medicinae utriusque universae compendium (Basileae: Perna, 1568).
91 Nicolas Machiavel, Le prince (Paris: Robert Le Mangnierde, 1571), Aiiir. On Gohory's hermetic thinking see Bowen, Jacques Gohory; Kahn, ‘Le paracelsisme’. Although Cappel's translation was better, the version repeatedly reprinted was that of d’Auvergne. In 1571, Gohory also published a new edition of the Discourses (see the next note).
92 Nicolas Machiavel, Les discours sur la premier decade de Tite Live (Paris: Robert le Mangnier, 1571), Aiiv.
93 Machiavelli, Le prince (1571), Aiiiir. The translation is based on Anglo, Machiavelli – the First Century, 211. Cf. Gorris Camos, ‘Nel labirinto’, par. 34.
94 Ibid. The translation is based on Biasiori, ‘Islamic Roots’, 22. Note that Le Roy also denied astrological determinism: ‘Les iugemens d’astrologie sont fort incertains’. Le Roy, De l’origine, 36.
95 This has been revealed by Biasiori, ‘Islamic Roots’, 22–4.
96 Machiavelli, Le prince (1571), unnumbered third page of the vita.
97 These are the words of Gohory's relative Milles Perrot, who he agreeingly quotes in the preface to the Discourses (Machiavel, Les discours, Aiiiir), while in Machiavelli's vita he repeats much the same. Machiavelli, Le prince (1571), unnumbered fourth page. Cf. Gorris Camos, ‘Dans le labyrinthe’.
98 On Piccolomini see the article of Franco Tommasi, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 83 (2015): 203–8. On his science see Rufus Suter, ‘The Scientific Work of Alessandro Piccolomini’, Isis 60 (1969): 210–22; Stefano Caroti, ‘L’Aristotele italiano di Alessandro Piccolomini: un progetto sistematico di filosofia naturale in volgare a metà '500’, in Il volgare come lingua di cultura dal Trecento al Cinquecento, ed. Arturo Calzona et al. (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 361–401; Daniele Cozzoli, ‘Alessandro Piccolomini and the Certitude of Mathematics’, History and Philosophy of Logic 28 (2007): 151−71; Eugenio Refini, ‘Il commento ai classici nell’esperienza intellettuale di Alessandro Piccolomini’, in Alessandro Piccolomini (1508–1579): un Siennois à la croisée des genres et des savoirs, ed. Marie-Françoise Piéjus et al. (Paris: Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, 2012), 259–73; Marco Sgarbi, The Italian Mind. Vernacular Logic in Renaissance Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 175–212.
99 A. Piccolominus, De sphaera libri quatuor (Basel: Perna, 1568), which included as attachments De cognoscendis stellis fixis compendium and De aquae ac terrae magnitudine liber unus.
100 Alessandro Piccolomini, Della grandezza della terra et dell’acqua (Venice, 1558), 1v–2r. For an overview of Piccolomini's work and his tremendous stress on sensory experience (also in his defence of the Ptolemaic universe), see Suter, ‘The Scientific Work of Alessandro Piccolomini’, 210–22.
101 On his (lost) Lucretian commentary see Refini, ‘Il commento ai classici’, 261–2.
102 Although Piccolomini confirmed that the world had a beginning, he could also imagine (acknowledging Aristotle's idea of an eternal world) that it had no end. Alessandro Piccolomini, De la sfera del mondo (Venetia: al segno del pozzo, 1540), 39v–40r.
103 Ibid., 39v.
104 Ibid.
105 Piccolomini, De sphaera, *2v. Cf. Almási, ‘Experientia’, 874.
106 Ludovicus Buccaferrea, Aristotelis de Physico auditu liber I Ludovici Buccaferreae praelectionibus ex Graecorum simul et Latinorum interpretum sententia explicatus (Basel: Perna, 1577).
107 Ibid., ):( 2r–3v.
108 Ibid., ):( 2r. Cf. with Machiavelli, Discourses, book 1.2:
For in the beginning of the world, the inhabitants were few in number, and lived for a time dispersed, like beasts. […] Thence they began to know the good and the honest, and to distinguish them from the bad and vicious …
109 See Discourses on Livy, 1.2, 1.6, 2.19 and Machiavelli, The Golden Ass, 3.85–129. Cf. with Rahe, ‘In the Shadow of Lucretius’, 52: ‘The foundation of [Machiavelli's] teaching concerning politics and morals is his claim that the human world is consonant with the natural world depicted in De rerum natura’.
110 Paulus Jovius, Opera omnia (Basel: Perna, 1578), (:) 2r–3v. The preface was reproduced in Perini, Vita e i tempi, 342–8. See Almási, ‘Experientia’, 877.
111 ‘Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu’ is an axiom from Thomas Aquinas's De veritate, q. 2 a. 3 arg. 19. There is some irony in referring to this peripatetic axiom as being trite at the academy.
112 Jovius, Opera omnia, (:) 2v.
113 Ibid., (:) 3r.
114 It was Perna's common practice to pay others to write dedications in his name (see Gilly, Theodor Zwinger e la crisi culturale, 200–1; Almási, ‘Experientia’). The use of the Paracelsian term αὐτοψια and the phrase ‘humanae vitae theatrum’ suggest that the author was Zwinger, who rephrased Stupanus's dedication of the year before. However, since the second part of the dedication was surely written by Perna, we cannot exclude his authorship either, although some kind of collaboration seems more probable.
115 Almási, ‘Experientia’.
116 Theodor Zwinger, ed., In politicos libros prolegomena, in Aristotelis politicorum libri octo ex Dion. Lambini et P. Victorii interpretationibus (Basel: Episcopius, 1582).
117 On Zwinger's epistemology see Gilly's publications, as in notes 89 and 115, and Carlos Gilly, ‘Theatrum humanae vitae: From natural anthropology to a “Novum Organum” of sciences’, in Magia, alchimia, scienza dal ‘400 al ‘700: l’influsso di Ermete Trismegisto, ed. Carlos Gilly and Cis van Heertum, 2 vols (Florence: Centro Di, 2002), 1:253–74. Also see Paola Molino, ‘Alle origini della Methodus Apodemica di Theodor Zwinger: la collaborazione di Hugo Blotius, fra empirismo ed universalismo’, Codices Manuscripti 56/57 (2006): 43–67; Seifert, Cognitio historica, 79–88; Ann Blair, ‘Historia in Zwinger's Theatrum humanae vitae’, in Historia. Empiricism and Erudition (as in note 62), 269–96; Almási, ‘Experientia’ 875–6. Note also that his distancing from Aristotle was apparently a gradual process, breaking with an Aristotelian system of knowledge only in the 1586 edition of the Theatrum humanae vitae.
118 Cf. Theodor Zwinger, Theatrum humanae vitae (Basel, 1571), 613; idem (Basel, 1586), 1579. See Gilly, ‘Zwischen Erfahrung und Spekulation’, 164–70; Gilly, ‘Theatrum humanae vitae’.
119 There were three, always larger Basel editions in Zwinger's life: in 1565 (Oporinus), 1571 (Froben), and 1586 (Episcopius). See Blair, ‘Historia in Zwinger's Theatrum’, 273–5.
120 Quoted by Blair, idem, 273.
121 See Seifert's criticism of Zwinger in Cognitio historica, 87–8. On historia see also the essays in Historia. Empiricism.
122 Blair, ‘Historia in Zwinger's Theatrum’, 285.
123 Machiavelli, Princeps (1580, 1st ed.), a2v. See Almási, ‘Experientia’, 878.
124 See Victoria Kahn's similar conclusion regarding Innocent Gentillet, stressing not scientific but ‘rhetorical’ method:
Behind Gentillet's Discours contre Machiavel stand hundreds of Renaissance readers for whom Machiavelli is not first and foremost a theorist of republicanism or reason of state, but a proponent of a rhetorical and, to a greater or lesser extent, historicist method of analyzing politics.
125 [Innocent Gentillet], Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner et maintenir en bonne paix un royaume ou autre principauté Anti-Machiavel (s.l., 1576). Modern edition with the same title by C. Edward Rathé, Geneva: Droz, 1968. On Gentillet see Vincenzo Lavenia's article in Enciclopedia Machiavelliana, 1:601–5; and José Luis Egío García, ‘Calvinismo, Galicanismo y Antimaquiavelismo en el Pensamiento Político de Innocent Gentillet’ (PhD diss., University of Murcia, 2015). On the Discours see Antonio D’Andrea, ‘Machiavelli, Satan, and the Gospel’, Yearbook of Italian Studies 1 (1971): 156–77; Kahn, ‘Reading Machiavelli’; N.W. Bawcutt, ‘The “Myth of Gentillet” Reconsidered: An Aspect of Elizabethan Machiavellianism’, The Modern Language Review 99 (2004): 863–74.
126 Innocent Gentillet, Discourse vpon the meanes of vvel governing … (London: Adam Islip, 1602), Aiv.
127 Here I followed the original, Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner, 1.
128 Gentillet, Discourse vpon the meanes, Aiv-Aiir.
129 Ibid., Aiir.
130 Ibid.
131 [Gentillet], Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner, 171–2. See Rahe, ‘In the Shadow of Lucretius’, 48.
132 For an opposite reading of Gentillet's preface see Kelley, who took him literally (Kelley, ‘Murd’rous Machiavel’, 557).
133 Lambert Daneau, Politicorum aphorismorum silva, ex optimis quibusque tum Graecis, tum Latinis scriptoribus […] collecta (Antverpiae: Plantin, 1583).
134 Quoted by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–78, at 61.
135 What exactly Roman historical experience meant for early modern political thinking is the subject of John Pocock's research. See, for example, his Barbarism and Religion. Volume Three.
136 Albericus Gentilis, De legationibus libri tres (London, 1585), 108–9. See Diego Panizza, ‘Machiavelli e Alberico Gentili’, Pensiero politico 2 (1969): 476–83; Diego Pirillo, ‘“Questo buon monaco non ha inteso in Macchiavello”: Reading Campanella in Sarpi's Shadow’, Bruniana & Campanelliana 20 (2014): 129–44, at 130–3; Alessandra Petrina, ‘Alberico Gentili e la circolazione dell’opera di Machiavelli in Inghilterra’, in Alberico Gentili. “Responsibility to Protect”: nuovi orientamenti su intervento umanitario e ordine internazionale, ed. Vincenzo Lavenia (Macerata: EUM, 2015), 195–213; Davide Suin, ‘Repubblicanesimo e realismo politico nel De legationibus di Alberico Gentili’, Pensiero politico 48 (2015): 432–48.
137 See Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna, passim; Elena Severini, ‘Some notes about the diffusion of Francesco Guicciardini's Ricordi in Germany’, in Fruits of Migration [forthcoming]; and especially Valentina Lepri, Layered Wisdom: Early Modern Collections of Political Precepts (Padova: Cleup, 2015). For its relation to the commonplace literature see Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities; R. Kolb, ‘Teaching the Text: The Commonplace Method in Sixteenth-Century Biblical Commentary’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance 49 (1987): 57–85; Ann Blair, ‘Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book’, Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 541–51; Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).
138 Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 110. The book in question, published much later by Milton: The cabinet-council: containing the chief arts of empire, and mysteries of state (London: T. Newcomb, [1658]). On Raleigh's dubious authorship but apparent Machiavellism see Ioannis D. Evrigenis, ‘Sir Walter Raleigh's Machiavelli’, in Machiavellian Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England: Literary and Political Influences from the Reformation to the Restoration, ed. Alessandro Arienzo and Alessandra Petrina (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 59–74.
139 Francesco Guicciardini, Più consigli et avvertimenti di M. Fr. Guicciardini […] in materia di republica e di privata (Parigi: F. Morello, 1576). In fact, Gentillet may have been influenced by Guicciardini in his criticism of Machiavelli. On Corbinelli see Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna, 173–92.
140 For example, the Propositioni christiane et civili (c. 1585) by a follower of Guicciardini, the diplomat Cesare Speciano may also be read as a criticism of Machiavelli's method (and not only of Giovanni Botero). Cf. Diego Quaglioni, ‘Cesare Speciano: prudenza politica e ragione di stato’, in Machiaveli e la lingua della giurisprudenza (Bologna: il Mulino, 2011), 211–28.
141 Francesco Sansovino, Francesco Guicciardini, Gio. Francesco Lottini, Propositioni, overo Considerationi in materia di cose di stato, sotto titolo di Avvertimenti, Avvedimenti civili et Concetti politici (Vinegia: A. Salicato, 1583). On Lottini see Lepri, Layered Wisdom, 79–89; on Sansovino see ibid., passim; Procacci, Studi sulla fortuna, 320–6; Luca Sartorello, Le due repubbliche: Bartolo e Machiavelli in un Dialogo inedito di Francesco Sansovino (Firenze: Centro editoriale toscano, 2010).
142 Sansovino et al., Propositioni, *3r.
143 Ten years later (in 1593) the same was asserted in the beginning of a letter treatise by Polish Chancellor Jan Zamoyski: ‘Prudence is nothing but the foreknowledge of future events from the consideration of past ones and the understanding of the good to be followed and the bad to be avoided’. See János Bethlen, Historia rerum Transilvanicarum (Viennae: Kurzbeck, 1783), 87–105. Critically edited in Gábor Petneházi, ‘Exemplum és prudentia. Jan Zamoyski [cenzúrázott] Kasszandra-levele Báthory Zsigmondnak 1593-ból’ [Exemplum and prudence. The censored Cassandra letter of Jan Zamojski to Sigismund Báthory from 1593], Magyar Könyvszemle 133 (2017): 381–417.
144 Considerationi civili, sopra l’Historie di M. Francesco Guicciardini, e d’altri historici … (Venetia: Damiano Zenaro, 1582), a2r-v. The translation is based on Lepri, Layered Wisdom, 103–4.
145 See Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 114–55; John P. McCormick, ‘Machiavelli against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School's “Guicciardinian Moments”’, Political Theory 31 (2003): 615–43.
146 See Horst Dreitzel, ‘Die Entwicklung der Historie zur Wissenschaft’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 8 (1981): 257–84; Merio Scattola, Dalla virtù alla scienza: la fondazione e la trasformazione della disciplina politica nell’età moderna (Milan: F. Angeli, 2003).
147 Henning Arnisäus, Doctrina politica in genuinam methodum Aristotelis reducta (Francofurti: Impensis Io. Thiemen, 1606), 13–45. See Horst Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat. Die „Politica“ des Henning Arnisaeus (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1970), 116–28.
148 On Bornitz see Michel Senellart, ‘La critique allemande de la raison d’état machiavélienne dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle: Jacob Bornitz’, Corpus: Revue de philosophie 31 (1997): 175–87; Vera Keller, ‘Mining Tacitus: Secrets of Empire, Nature, and Art in the Reason of State’, British Journal for the History of Science 45 (2012): 189–212; Scattola, Dalla virtù alla scienza, 126–39.
149 Eccl. i. 9.
150 The proverb goes back to Thucydides. See Udo Klee, Beiträge zur Thukydides-Rezeption während des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts in Italien und Deutschland (Frankfurt etc.: Lang, 1990), 102.
151 Jacobus Bornitius, Discursus politicus de prudentia politica comparanda denuo correctius editus a Johanne Bornitio (Wittenberg: Laurentius Seuberlich, 1604), C8v-Dr.
152 Lisa Jardine claims (relying on Book 2 of the Advancement) that in Bacon's treatment of politics not the inductive method but traditional techniques of generalisation and argument by analogy dominate. L. Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 150–68.
153 Guido Giglioni, ‘Historia and materia: the philosophical implications of Francis Bacon's natural history’, Early Science and Medicine 17 (2012): 62–86. Also see Silvia Manzo, ‘The Ethics of Motion: Self-Preservation, Preservation of the Whole, and the “Double Nature of the Good” in Francis Bacon’, in Motion and Power in Francis Bacon's Philosophy, ed. Guido Giglioni et al. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 175–200.
154 For the similar aims of Bacon's legal scholarship, see Peter Stein, Regulae Iuris: from Juristic Rules to Legal Maxims (Edinburgh: University press, 1966), 170–5; Silvia Manzo, ‘Certainity, laws, and facts in Francis Bacon's jurisprudence’, Intellectual History Review 24 (2014), 457–78.
155 Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning (New York: Willey, 1944), 76–7 (ch. 3.1). Since the places I quote are all included in the original English edition I prefer to follow this version.
156 This is more fully explained in his ‘Orpheus, sive philosophia’:
Natural philosophy proposes to itself, as its noblest work of all, nothing less than the restitution and renovation of things corruptible, and (what is indeed the same thing in a lower degree) the conservation of bodies in the state in which they are, and the retardation of dissolution and putrefaction.
157 Ibid. See also the third axiom of the Novum Organum (book 1):
Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.
158 See Napoleone Orsini, Bacone e Machiavelli (Genoa: Orfini, 1936); Vincent Luciani, ‘Bacon and Machiavelli’, Italica 24 (1947): 26–40; Jardine, Francis Bacon, 150–248; B.H.G. Wormald, Francis Bacon: History, Politics and Science, 1561–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 105–19; Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 113–9; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Bacon's “Of Simulation and Dissimulation”’, in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 233–40; Guido Giglioni, ‘Introduction. Francis Bacon and the Theologico-political Reconfiguration of Desire in the Early Modern Period’, in Francis Bacon on Motion and Power, ed. G. Giglioni et al. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 1–40; Rahe, ‘Machiavelli and the Modern Tyrant’, 217–18.
159 Bacon, Advancement, 235 (ch. 8.1). This was also the main point of Kaspar Schoppe's fight for Machiavelli's rehabilitation. See Gábor Almási, ‘Rehabilitating Machiavelli: Kaspar Schoppe with and against Rome’, History of European Ideas 42 (2016): 981–1004.
160 Bacon, Advancement, 222 (ch. 7.2).
161 Most relevant is book 8, where Bacon applies Machiavelli's advice for using opportunity in preserving and enlarging the state for the self-government of the individual.
162 See the first letter in Francis Bacon, Early Writings, 1584–1596 (The Oxford Francis Bacon, 1), ed. Alan Stewart and Harriet Knight (Oxford: Clarendon, 2012), 645. I modernised the spelling.
163 Ibid., 647.
164 Bacon, Advancement, 255 (ch. 8.2, after Aphorism 34). Note that in chapter 2.10 (p. 58) Bacon calls this way of writing a special (mixed) version of civil history (i.e. politics):
A kind of writing has been introduced that does not give particular narrations in the continued thread of a history, but where the writer collects and culls them, with choice, out of an author, then reviewing and as it were ruminating upon them, takes occasion to treat of political subjects; and this kind of ruminated history we highly esteem.
165 Here I do not intend to comment on the difference between Bacon and Ramus with regard to the former's sensibility for the rhetorical construction and transmission of knowledge. This was certainly a new perspective, which apparently become a problem also for Bacon only later (see the last two chapters of book 2 of the Advancement, which were still missing from the 1605 edition).
166 We may mention in Bacon's company, for example, Jacob Bornitz and Kaspar Schoppe. Cf. Almási, ‘Rehabilitating Machiavelli: Kaspar Schoppe’.
167 ‘The maxim, with its pithy form and flexible use, was the rhetorical equivalent of political virtù’. Kahn, ‘Machiavelli's afterlife’, 248. Cf. idem, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 108.
168 Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 93. Kahn does not suggest that this applied only to the end of the century, although her examples come from that period.