To reclaim his powers, wizard Felix Harrowgate must restore the magical talisman known as the Virtu-by confronting the dark sorcerer who destroyed it.

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In this highly original interpretation of Machiavelli's thought, Anthony J. Parel identifies a theme generally neglected in the scholarship of this sixteenth-century political thinker: Machiavelli's belief in the occult forces of heaven and humors. Challenging the current tendency to view Machiavelli as a pioneer of modern political science, Parel argues instead that a premodern cosmology and anthropology underlie Machiavelli's political works. Parel shows that Machiavelli's world picture owes more to the astrological cosmology prevalent in the Renaissance than to the Aristotelian or Platonic or Christian world picture. This astrological determination significantly affects Machiavelli's conceptions of history, politics, and religion and shapes his notions of virtu and fortuna. It also has considerable impact on his ethical ideas: the Machiavellian cosmos has no room for a Ruling Mind or for the Sovereignty of the Good, and humans are left to pursue their appetites for riches and glory as best they can. In a similar fashion, says Parel Machiavelli's political anthropology is influenced by the ancient idea that body humors determine a person's temperament and behavior, for he believes that humors compromise human autonomy and rationality. According to Parel, the theory of humors also affects Machiavelli's view of the body politic and his characterization of republics, princedoms, and licenzia, and Parel explicates this in new readings of The Prince, the Discourses, and the Florentine Histories.

Political theorist Wendy Brown has argued recently that contemporary neoliberalism, with its relentless obsession on the economy, has all but undone the tenets of democracy. The focus on maximizing credit scores and capital has, over time, promoted a politics that operates beyond and below the institutional and electoral world, eroding not just the desire for democratic action but even our ability to imagine it. In light of recent politics, it seems we may have reached the apotheosis of this depressing vision. This book is meant to suggest one way of thinking past and out of the current moment, and it does so by looking to a perhaps unlikely figure: Niccolo Machiavelli. The book presents Machiavelli as an anachronistic thinker -- a thinker who, deprived of his political community and public identity during his exile from Florence, originated a new approach to democratic theory and practice. In particular he immersed himself in the writings of ancient thinkers and looked to them as models for understanding contemporary problems of corruption, conspiracy, and torture. This book's main contribution is a methodological one: it argues that the power in Machiavelli's work derived from this sort of anachronistic reading, which went against the grain of Renaissance thought. In turn it shows that if we imitate Machiavelli's interpretive method in reading The Prince and Discourses of Livy, we can find in them solutions to the neoliberal problems Brown warns about.

A dashing and highly respected wizard, Felix Harrowgate thought he had eluded his dark past. Within the walls of the Mirador—Mélusine’s citadel of power and magic—Felix believed he was free of his abusive former master, a wizard who had enslaved him, body and soul, and trained him to pass as a nobleman. He was wrong. Raised as a kept-thief and trained as an assassin, Mildmay the Fox is used to being hunted. Having slipped his Keeper long ago, he survives as a cat burglar—until he’s caught by a mysterious magician using a powerful calling charm. And yet the magician was looking not for Mildmay—but for Felix Harrowgate... Bound by fate, the broken wizard Felix and the wanted killer Mildmay will journey far from Mélusine through lands thick with strange magics and terrible demons of darkness—but it is the secret from their pasts that will either save them or destroy them...

“[An] extraordinary first fantasy novel focuses on two captivating characters . . . [A] highly original writer with her own unique voice.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review From an award-winning author, the first book in the spellbinding series, The Doctrine of Labyrinths Welcome to Mélusine , a city as wondrous as it is corrupt. Within its walls lies a stronghold of power and magic, a shining setting for the brilliant Felix Harrowgate. A well-respected wizard and darling of the court, Felix harbors sordid secrets from his peers in the aristocracy: a dark past in which a sadistic wizard enslaved him body and mind, even as he schooled Felix in how to walk among noblemen as if he were one of them. An abuser Felix believes himself free of, until a return to his former master’s lair leads to his harrowing fall from grace. Broken, lost, Felix finds an unlikely accomplice in Mildmay the Fox. Trained to be an assassin, surviving as a thief, Mildmay knows what it is to be hunted. When fate brings the weakened wizard and the wanted killer together, they escape Mélusine, traveling through strange lands where they encounter peculiar magic and powerful demons. A world where shocking secrets will be laid bare—dark truths that will bind them together forever. “A lush novel, rife with decadent magic.” —Jacqueline Carey, New York Times–bestselling author of the Kushiel's Legacy series “A spellbinding, gut-wrenching, breathtaking quest that resonates with truth and heart.” —Joan D. Vinge, Hugo and Locus award-winning author of The Snow Queen “[Addison’s] characters deserve a standing ovation.” —Booklist, starred review Originally published under the name Sarah Monette.

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.