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The Defeat of a Renaissance Intellectual

Selected Writings of Francesco Guicciardini

ISBN-13: 9780271083483
Publisher: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Imprint: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Edited and translated by Carlo Celli, By Francesco Guicciardini
Price: AUD $217.00
Stock: 0 in stock
Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 14/07/2019
Format: Hardback 240 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: European history [HBJD]

Description

Table of Contents

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A papal advisor and sixteenth-century power broker, Francesco Guicciardini wrote voluminously throughout his time in service to the Medici. The texts in this volume chart his career chronologically, revealing how an intellectual whose philosophy of self-interest failed not only to perceive the interests of others but ultimately to serve his own.

During Guicciardini’s life, Florentine politics was dominated by the struggle of republican leaders to retain civic political autonomy against the ambitions of the Medici family. Like Machiavelli, and Petrarch, and arguably even Dante, Guicciardini was what Carlo Celli calls an “establishment intellectual,” who used his talents to further the hegemony of authoritarian rule against the interests of his own class. The letters, treatises, reports, and orations included in this volume span Guicciardini’s long career, from his first appointment as ambassador to the Spanish court to just a few years before his forced retirement from political life. They reveal Guicciardini’s role as a true protagonist in the events related in his famous History of Italy (1540), shed light on the self-recriminations and remorse that sometimes gnawed at his conscience, and show why, ultimately, Guicciardini fell from political grace into irrelevance.

Through these previously untranslated writings, The Defeat of a Renaissance Intellectual shows the hard lessons Guicciardini learned in service to the Medici: working within a corrupt system does not lead to solutions, and reason and self-interest are not foolproof guides for predicting human behavior. It will appeal especially to scholars who study the Medici clan, the Italian Wars, and Renaissance politics and history.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Limits of Self-Interest

To Himself

Report on Spain

How to Ensure the State for the House of the Medici

On the Use of Force

On Suicide for Political Reasons

On Progressive Taxation: The Scaled Tenth

Report on the Defense of Parma

Letter to Francesco Maria della Rovere

Consolation

Accusation

Defense Against the Preceding

Savonarolian Excerpts (Selections)

Response on Behalf of the Duke to the Complaints of the Exiles

Index

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The Defeat of a Renaissance Intellectual

Selected Writings of Francesco Guicciardini