Machiavelli: The First Century. Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance by Sydney Anglo

Abstract

MLR, 102. I, 2007 25I of theprotagonist in theParadiso should be seen as thatof the progressive 'transfor mation of his body into a resurrected body' (p. 176). SHINSHU UNIVERSITY DAVID RUZICKA Machiavelli: The First Century. Studies inEnthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance. By SYDNEY ANGLO. (Oxford-Warburg Studies) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. x+765 PP. ?8o. ISBN 978-0-I9-926776-7. This is a very impressive book. It deals with the response to Machiavelli in Western Europe from the the early sixteenth to the early seventeenth century. It is the result ofmany years' work and the reading of literallyhundreds of contemporary books and pamphlets, mainly inLatin, English, French, and Italian, aswell as a large amount of recent scholarship on the subject. This learning iscarried fairly lightly,and thewrit ing is crisp and lucid. Those familiarwith Sydney Anglo's earlier study, Machiavelli: A Dissection (London: Gollancz, I969), will know thathe isno hero-worshipper, and his comments on authors are frequentlypungent and enlivening. (I will leave readers to discover for themselves the ratherdreadful joke on page 499.) At the same time, thosewho approach the book having read earlier discussions by scholars such asMario Praz, Felix Raab, and Emile Gasquet, may be slightly dis concerted byAnglo's choice ofmaterials. He is interested inwriters who show a real and serious engagement with the detail ofMachiavelli's arguments, and are deeply influenced by him, and he tends to ignore two contrasting extremes of response. One of these includes thehundreds ofwriters who make merely a brief passing reference to him, even if it is specific and accurate. Still less does he bother with the 'Machi avel' bogeyman found in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and the only plays he treats at any length areMarlowe's The Yew of Malta, because of itsprologue spoken byMachiavel, and Barnabe Barnes's The Devil's Charter, perhaps because Barnes's personal copy of II principe, in Wolfe's edition of I584, still survives. (He seems not to know thatBarnes also owned theDiscorsi-see 'Barnabe Barnes's Ownership of Machiavelli's Discorsi', Notes and Queries, 227 (I982), 4 I.) The other extreme concerns major writers of theperiod-Bodin and Montaigne, Ralegh and Bacon-who can be shown to have readMachiavelli with insight and intelligence. Anglo does not discuss any of them at length, because he considers the Machiavellian influence tohave been only a very small part of theirextensive learning, and ithas not yet been demonstrated that they would have been significantlydifferent if Machiavelli had never existed. Even thegreatwriters themselves sometimes provoke caustic remarks from Anglo-he endorses J. W. Allen' sjudgement ofBodin (AHistory ofPolitical Thought in theSixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1928), p. 404) as a 'bore' (p. 548), and asserts thatBacon's achievements in the fieldsof law,science, and politics, despite his undoubtedly great abilities, were 'strictlylimited' (p. 647). As a result of this approach, there are some surprises in the choice of authors for discussion. Most readers (including the present reviewer) will not have heard of, let alone read, the I605 elaborately annotated translation into French by Blaise de Vi genere of the treatise on the art ofwar by Onosander, written inGreek in the first century AD. But Vigenere was deeply, and often intelligently, influenced byMachi avelli's writings, especially theA rtedella guerra, so he receives an extended treatment stretching to sixteen pages. Agostino Nifo's De regnandiperitia (I523) is sometimes dismissed as a crude plagiarism of II principe, but Anglo considers the relationship between the twoworks to be much more subtle and interesting, and gives Nifo a separate forty-page chapter tohimself. At theheart of thebook isa very substantial account of Innocent Gentillet' sfamous 252 Reviews attack onMachiavelli, published in 1576. Despite its imperfections, it is 'the most ex tensive and systematic study ofMachiavelli undertaken in the sixteenth century, and certainly themost influential' (p. 230). Gentillet may have had very restricted abili ties,but he was 'theonly sixteenth-century political theorist ofwhom it may be said unequivocally thathis thinkingwas shaped principally by a reading ofMachiavelli' (p. 284). Some of his misinterpretations derive from his use of unreliable French translations rather than Italian originals, and his technique of reducing Machiavelli to a series of separate 'maxims' is defended (pp. 297-99...