The intimate world of Niccolò Machiavelli comes to life in this first complete collection in English of the letters he wrote and received. Spanning his adult life from 1497 until his death in 1527, these letters to and from his friends and compatriots--some of whom, such as Francesco Guicciardini and Francesco Vettori, were among the most influential thinkers of the day--reveal his personality and present a panorama of life, people, and critical events in Renaissance Italy. The correspondence offers valuable insight into the origins of Machiavelli's ideas on history, politics, literature, and society and the social context from which his achievements arose. Often his correspondence served as a testing ground for ideas he developed more fully in his writing. While the letters taken together show Machiavelli both living within and transcending his own time, on a more intimate level they reveal the human element that helped to shaped his thought. Machiavelli emerges as an individual with multifaceted capabilities and a multitude of roles, among them devoted humanist, political analyst, shrewd rhetorician, and practical joker. Based on Franco Gaets's authoritative critical Italian edition of Machiavelli's correspondence, the collection includes 257 letters written to Machiavelli and 84 letters written by him. Arranged chronologically, correspondence to and by Machiavelli is interwoven so that readers may easily follow discussions between him and his associates. The translators' introduction establishes the political and cultural context of the correspondence, and headnotes introduce each section of letters. Explanatory and historical annotations illuminate people, places, and events mentioned within the letters. Machiavelli's correspondence opens a window onto an important era in Western intellectual history, disclosing the language, thoughts, and preoccupations of some of the key people who shaped the Italian Renaissance. As the definitive edition, Machiavelli and His Friends will interest students of Machiavelli, specialists in political science and Renaissance literature and history, and general readers desiring to know more intimately one of the most fascinating personalities of the Renaissance.

In Machiavelliana Michael Jackson and Damian Grace offer a comprehensive study of the uses and abuses of Niccolò Machiavelli’s name in society generally and in academic fields distant from his intellectual origins. It assesses the appropriation of Machiavelli in didactic works in management, social psychology, and primatology, scholarly texts in leaderships studies, as well as novels, plays, commercial enterprises, television dramas, operas, rap music, Mach IV scales, children’s books, and more. The book audits, surveys, examines, and evaluates this Machiavelliana against wider claims about Machiavelli. It explains the origins of Machiavelli’s reputation and the spread of his fame as the foundation for the many uses and misuses of his name. They conclude by redressing the most persistent distortions of Machiavelli.

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.

Between Friends offers the first extended close reading of the most famous epistolary dialogue of the Renaissance, the letters exchanged from 1513 to 1515 by Niccolo Machiavelli and Francesco Vettori. John Najemy reveals the literary richness and theoretical tensions of the correspondence, the crucial importance of the dialogue with Vettori in Machiavelli's emergence as a writer and political theorist, and the close but complex relationship between the letters and Machiavelli's major works on politics. Unlike previous and mostly fragmentary treatments of the correspondence, this book reads the letters as a continuously developing, collaborative text in which problems of language and interpretation gradually emerge as the critical issues. Najemy argues that Vettori's skeptical reaction to Machiavelli's first letters on politics and provoked Machiavelli into a defense of language's power to represent the world, a notion that soon become the underlying assumption of The Prince. Later, and largely through an apparently whimsical exchange of letters on love and the foibles of eros, Vettori led Machiavelli to confront the power of desire in language, which opened the way for a different, essentially poetic, approach to writing about politics that surfaces for the first time in the pages of the Discourses on Livy. John M. Najemy is Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400 (North Carolina). Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"From the NPR host of The Indicator and correspondent for Planet Money comes an “accessible, funny, clear-eyed, and practical” (Sarah Knight, New York Times bestselling author) guide for how women can apply the principles of 16th-century philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli to their work lives and finally shatter the glass ceiling—perfect for fans of Feminist Fight Club, Lean In, and Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office."--Simonandschuster.com viewed Sept. 21, 2022.

'A wonderfully assured and utterly riveting biography that captures not only the much-maligned Machiavelli, but also the spirit of his time and place. A monumental achievement.' – Jessie Childs, author of God's Traitors. ‘A notorious fiend’, ‘generally odious’, ‘he seems hideous, and so he is.’ Thanks to the invidious reputation of his most famous work, The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli exerts a unique hold over the popular imagination. But was Machiavelli as sinister as he is often thought to be? Might he not have been an infinitely more sympathetic figure, prone to political missteps, professional failures and personal dramas? Alexander Lee reveals the man behind the myth, following him from cradle to grave, from his father’s penury and the abuse he suffered at a teacher’s hands, to his marriage and his many affairs (with both men and women), to his political triumphs and, ultimately, his fall from grace and exile. In doing so, Lee uncovers hitherto unobserved connections between Machiavelli’s life and thought. He also reveals the world through which Machiavelli moved: from the great halls of Renaissance Florence to the court of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, from the dungeons of the Stinche prison to the Rucellai gardens, where he would begin work on some of his last great works. As much a portrait of an age as of a uniquely engaging man, Lee’s gripping and definitive biography takes the reader into Machiavelli’s world – and his work – more completely than ever before.