1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910780050203321

Autore

Kahn Victoria Ann

Titolo

Machiavellian rhetoric : from the Counter-Reformation to Milton / / Victoria Kahn

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, N.J. : , : Princeton University Press, , 1994

©1994

ISBN

1-4008-2128-2

1-4008-1225-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xiv, 314 pages)

Disciplina

320.1/092

Soggetti

Rhetoric - History

Politics and literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [249]-310) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations and Note on Spelling and Translations -- Introduction -- Part One: Machiavelli -- One: The Prince -- Two: The Discourses -- Three: Rhetoric and Reason of State: Botero's Reading of Machiavelli -- Part Two: English Machiavellism -- Four: Reading Machiavelli, 1550-1640 -- Five: Machiavellian Debates, 1530-1660 -- Part Three: Milton -- Six: A Rhetoric of Indifference -- Seven: Virtue and Virtù in Comus -- Eight: Machiavellian Rhetoric in Paradise Lost -- Coda: Rhetoric and the Critique of Ideology -- Appendix: A Brief Note on Rhetoric and Republicanism in the Historiography of the Italian Renaissance -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Historians of political thought have argued that the real Machiavelli is the republican thinker and theorist of civic virtù. Machiavellian Rhetoric argues in contrast that Renaissance readers were right to see Machiavelli as a Machiavel, a figure of force and fraud, rhetorical cunning and deception. Taking the rhetorical Machiavel as a point of departure, Victoria Kahn argues that this figure is not simply the result of a naïve misreading of Machiavelli but is attuned to the rhetorical dimension of his political theory in a way that later thematic readings of Machiavelli are not. Her aim is to provide a revised history of



Renaissance Machiavellism, particularly in England: one that sees the Machiavel and the republican as equally valid--and related--readings of Machiavelli's work. In this revised history, Machiavelli offers a rhetoric for dealing with the realm of de facto political power, rather than a political theory with a coherent thematic content; and Renaissance Machiavellism includes a variety of rhetorically sophisticated appreciations and appropriations of Machiavelli's own rhetorical approach to politics. Part I offers readings of The Prince, The Discourses, and Counter-Reformation responses to Machiavelli. Part II discusses the reception of Machiavelli in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England. Part III focuses on Milton, especially Areopagitica, Comus, and Paradise Lost.