The course will take place in the first part of the semester. It will address Machiavelli’s private correspondence by examining both the textual transmission of the letters and the issues related to their interpretation.
PRIMARY SOURCES:
- Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere a Francesco Vettori e a Francesco Guicciardini, a cura di Giorgio Inglese, Milano, Rizzoli, 1989.
- Niccolò Machiavelli, Dieci lettere private, a cura di Giovanni Bardazzi, Roma, Salerno, 1992.
SECONDARY SOURCES:
- Francesco Bausi, Fra arte dello stato e vocazione letteraria: vita e opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, in Id., Machiavelli, Roma, Salerno, 2005, pp. 27-99.
- John. M. Najemy, Firenze, in Enciclopedia machiavelliana, diretta da Gennaro Sasso, Roma, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2014, vol. I, pp. 553-561.
- Francesco Bausi - Alessio Decaria, Il carteggio privato di Niccolò Machiavelli. Problemi di resa grafica, 17, 2017, «Per leggere», pp. 193-216.
- William J. Connell, La lettera di Machiavelli a Vettori del 10 dicembre 1513, «Archivio storico italiano», 171, 2013, pp. 665-723.
- Emanuele Cutinelli-Rèndina, Niccolò Machiavelli (Firenze 1469-1527), in Autografi dei letterati italiani. Il Cinquecento, Tomo I, a cura di Matteo Motolese, Paolo Procaccioli, Emilio Russo. Consulenza paleografica di Antonio Ciaralli, Roma, Salerno, 2009, pp. 271-283.
- Jean-Jacques Marchand, Lettere, in Enciclopedia machiavelliana, diretta da Gennaro Sasso, Roma, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2014, vol. II, pp. 70-74.
- Giorgio Masi, Saper «ragionare di questo mondo». Il carteggio fra Machiavelli e Guicciardini, in
Cultura e scrittura di Machiavelli : atti del Convegno di Firenze-Pisa, 27-30 ottobre 1997, Roma, Salerno, 1998, pp. 487-522.
Further bibliography will be given during the course. A number of texts in digital format will be made available through moodle.
Learning Objectives
By the end of the course, each student will be able not only to critically situate Machiavelli’s oeuvre in its historical and literary context, but also to better understand the philological issues related to its textual transmission and reception. In order to achieve such goals each student will need to develop a set of technical skills required to approach the work of a major Renaissance author from a scholarly perspective.
Prerequisites
However not strictly required, a general knowledge of the literary and political history of the Italian Renaissance is desirable.
Teaching Methods
Frontal lecture
Further information
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Type of Assessment
Oral examination aimed at assessing:
1) the student’s familiarity with the topics covered in the course;
2) the student’s ability to set Machiavelli’s writings in their historical and literary context;
3) the student’s ability to interpret the texts examined in class, with particular regard to the discussion of their philological aspects;
4) the student’s ability to articulate in a technical, yet clear, way the questions dealt with throughout the course.
Course program
Even though Machiavelli, unlike Petrarch and many other humanists, did not collect his ‘familiares’ into a book to be made public or printed, a good amount of his letters has been subsequently anthologized and included into the Italian literary canon. To be fully appreciated, however, these letters need to be set against the biographical, social, and political context in which they were written; more importantly, this contextualization must involve a direct inspection of and comparison among all the extant copies – not only Machiavelli’s autographs – as well as a reassessment of their later reception.