THE GUICCIARDINIAN PRINCE: A STUDY IN THE MEANING OF PRUDENCE FROM BODIN TO RICHELIEU

The history of Francesco Guicciardini's contribution to political and historical thought begins with the long delayed and posthumous publication of his Storia d'Italia at Florence in 1561. During the same decade a series of Guicciardini's ricordi was released in obscure circumstances. The series was first published in 1576 by Jacopo Corbinelli, an Italian exile at the court of Catherine de' Medici, after a manuscript copy came into his possession. Both the Storia and this series of ricordi quickly became major sources of political ideas and precepts. As a contributor to Late Renaissance political and historical thought, Guicciardini rivalled Tacitus; the fortunes of both historians, the one ancient, the other modern, rose together.;In the remainder of my dissertation I turn my attention to the use of Guicciardini alone as a source of political and historical thought. One of the most influential Guicciardinians of the period was Francesco Sansovino, who, in introducing his work entitled the Propositioni...di cose di Stato (1583), named Guicciardini as the founder of the maxim genre and commended the quality of Guicciardini's prudenza and consiglio. Sansovino, moreover, edited another version of the ricordi, which he included also in the Propositioni. My chief preoccupation in Chapters 3 and 4 is to determine what aspects of Guicciardini's thought readers would have encountered in sixteenth-century editions of the ricordi and to examine the content of Sansovino's borrowings from Guicciardini. I argue that the reflections Sansovino assembled from all sources projected a model of princely behavior that was preeminently Guicciardinian rather than Machiavellian. The conduct of the Guicciardinian prince was motivated by prudence rather than by virtu.;The fifth and pivotal chapter allows me to probe the philosophical dimensions of prudence and to recover the meaning of that term in sixteenth-century political discourse. It also prepares the ground for a discussion of both Giovanni Botero's idea of prudence and his approximation of prudence with ragion di stato, to which I proceed in Chapter 6. Two of the remaining three chapters are devoted to a consideration of Guicciardini in France during the wars of religion and in the age of Richelieu. Francois de La Noue in the earlier and Jean de Silhon in the later period valued Guicciardini for his emphasis upon prudence, but they further recognized that he could be pressed into service as Machiavelli's direct antagonist. Despite their unrelenting efforts, Machiavelli found defenders; the penultimate chapter is therefore devoted to an analysis of how three pro-Machiavellian theorists--Justus Lipsius, Pierre Charron, and Gabriel Naude--helped to dislocate prudence from its customary anchorage in the economy of moral life, whence it drifted towards mere cleverness or cunning. The changing meaning of prudence, to which the philosophical movements of skepticism and rationalism contributed as much as the advance of Machiavellism, is also the point on which I conclude.;Jean Bodin, in the Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1956) and Corbinelli, in the annotations that he attached to Guicciardini's ricordi, provide evidence of the extent to which Guicciardini and Tacitus were associated by readers throughout the period. Bodin, for example, selected both as rich sources of maxims of prudence; at the same time he called upon the support of an Aristotelian-Thomist tradition of thought to give a philosophical justification to the task of collecting maxims from works of history. In fact, Bodin may be understood as the philosopher of Tacitism, as well as its primary instigator. "Guicciardinism," the main subject of my study, was the identical twin of Bodinian Tacitism. I seek to elucidate the assumptions that inspired both movements in Chapter 1, and in Chapter 2 I show how Corbinelli annotated Guicciardini's ricordi with sententiae from Tacitus.