A valuable, new translation of Machiavellis marvelous satire! Machiavelli writes in the prologue to Clizia that comedies were invented for the dual purpose of amusing and benefiting the audience. Clizia is no exception. It is a raucous comedy about love that extends to the scandalous, but it also contains a serious teaching about managing passions and relationships. Daniel Gallagher provides a lively and readable translation that enables readers to access not only the humor of the play but also makes possible thoughtful study of the plays more serious themes. His consistent and literal rendering of terms and numerous explanatory notes help readers identify Machiavellian curiosities in the language and understand the plays many allusions to religious and Renaissance doctrines. Robert Faulkners introduction sets the stage for examining the complex work of art that is Clizia. He shows how the play mixes Machiavellian instruction with its wit and scandal, and that the malicious and scoffing humor is part of the instruction. In Clizia, as in the better-known Mandragola, Machiavelli intends reform through comedy. It is a reform that mixes liberation with techniques of management, an eerily contemporary reform of private life that complements Machiavellis famous reforms of public life.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) is the most famous and controversial figure in the history of political thought and one of the iconic names of the Renaissance. The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli brings together sixteen original essays by leading experts, covering his life, his career in Florentine government, his reaction to the dramatic changes that affected Florence and Italy in his lifetime, and the most prominent themes of his thought, including the founding, evolution, and corruption of republics and principalities, class conflict, liberty, arms, religion, ethics, rhetoric, gender, and the Renaissance dialogue with antiquity. In his own time Machiavelli was recognized as an original thinker who provocatively challenged conventional wisdom. With penetrating analyses of The Prince, Discourses on Livy, Art of War, Florentine Histories, and his plays and poetry, this book offers a vivid portrait of this extraordinary thinker as well as assessments of his place in Western thought since the Renaissance.

After Machiavelli isan examination of the triangular relationship of re-writing- a dynamic process encompassing both creative newness and awareness ofhistorical profundity - the hermeneutic attitude," andMachiavelli's poiesis. Specifically,it addresses four questions: First, to what degree can we speak of intersection(interaction) among this triad? Second, what common ground do all threeactually share? Third, in what particular manner do the act of "re-writing"and the "hermeneutic attitude" manifest themselves in thewritings of Niccoló Machiavelli? And last, what bearing does this have on thereader, heir to Machiavelli's literary legacy? In answering these questions, Godorecci offers a closereading of a cycle of Machiavellian re-writings characterized by threeparticular cases: Machiavelli's rewriting of the works of others (Plautus's Casina, Terence's Andria, Livy's Ab urbecondita and Dante's De vulgari eloquentia), his own texts (the story ofVitellozzo Vitelli and the events in Sinigaglia at the court of Cesare Borgis),and the re-writing of him by others (in Gramsci's "modern prince"). Drawing onWilhelm Dilthey's ideas on experience, history, and hermeneutics, Godorecciprovides insights into Machiavelli's participation in the process of re-writingas expression of his own "hermeneutic attitude," which supports the universalvalidity of interpretation and (thus) clears space for others who come/take/run"after Machiavelli."

The Italian statesman and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli wrote not only political tracts but also comedies, poems, fables and letters that are seemingly lighthearted. The contributors to this volume explore the meanings of his works.

Reflections on principle and prudence in the thoughts and actions of great thinkers and statesmen. Discussions of the place of moral principle in political practice are haunted by the abstract and misleading distinction between realism and its various principled or “idealist” alternatives. This volume argues that such discussions must be recast in terms of the relationship between principle and prudence: as Nathan Tarcov maintains, that relationship is “not dichotomous but complementary.” In a substantive introduction, the editors investigate Leo Strauss’s attack on contemporary political thought for its failure to account for both principle and prudence in politics. Leading commentators then reflect on principle and prudence in the writings of great thinkers such as Homer, Machiavelli, and Hegel, and in the thoughts and actions of great statesmen such as Pericles, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In a concluding section, contributors reassess Strauss’s own approach to principle and prudence in the history of political philosophy. “Principle and Prudence in Western Political Thought contains a series of first-rate essays on a—if not the—central problem of political thought: how should and can abstract and general principles inform contingent, particularistic political life.” — Catherine H. Zuckert, coauthor of Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy

Exploring individual and collective formation of gender identities, this book contributes to current scholarly discourses by examining plays in the genre of 'erudite comedy' (commedia erudita), which was extremely popular among sixteenth-century Italians from the elite classes. Author Yael Manes investigates five erudite comedies-Ludovico Ariosto's I suppositi (1509), Niccolò Machiavelli's La Mandragola (1518) and Clizia (1525), Antonio Landi's Il commodo (1539), and Giovan Maria Cecchi's La stiava (1546)-to consider how erudite comedies functioned as ideological battlefields where the gender system of patriarchy was examined, negotiated, and critiqued. These plays reflect the patriarchal order of their elite social milieu, but they also offer a unique critical vantage point on the paradoxical formation of patriarchal masculinity. On the one hand, patriarchal ideology rejects the mother and forbids her as an object of desire; on the other hand, patriarchal male identity revolves around representations of motherhood. Ultimately, the comedies reflect the desire of the Italian Renaissance male elite for women who will provide children to their husbands but not actively assume the role of a mother. In sum, Manes reveals a wide cultural understanding that motherhood-as an activity that women undertake, not simply a relational position they occupy-challenges patriarchy because it bestows women with agency, power, and authority. Manes here recovers the complexity of Renaissance Italian discourse on gender and identity formation by approaching erudite comedies not only as mirrors of their audiences but also as vehicles for contemporary audiences' ideological, psychological, and emotional expressions.