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What do modern republics have to fear? Machiavelli's Florentine Republic reconstructs Machiavelli's answer to this question from the perspective of the Florentine Histories, his most probing meditation on the fate of republican politics in the modern age. It argues that his principle goal in narrating the defeat of Florentine republicanism is to debunk the views of leading humanists concerning the overall health of republican politics in modernity and the distinctive challenges that modern republics should expect to face. The Medici family had exposed these vulnerabilities better than anyone else, and Machiavelli reconstructs their political strategy to show how conventional ideas of moral and political virtue are the most potent instruments of princely ambition in a city that wants to be free

Who is Lucrezia, the mysterious woman at the center of Machiavelli's comic play Mandragola? And why is she deemed "fit to govern a kingdom"? This article revisits these questions with attention to Mandragola's sophisticated, and often irreverent, allusions to Roman source materials. While scholars have long recognized that Mandragola draws on Roman history and drama, its sustained engagement with Lucretian and Ovidian poetry has gone largely unnoticed. In what follows, I trace these allusions and show how Machiavelli uses them to bring into view the fertility of erotic desire. Mandragola is replete with Lucretian phrases and imagery, but a close examination of these references indicates they are made playfully, and even satirically, in the style of Ovid's Ars amatoria, a didactic elegy on the art of seduction that develops a mixed assessment of Epicurean teachings. Like Ovid, Machiavelli embraces the hedonism that motivates Epicureanism—but without accepting that happiness requires distancing ourselves from illusion. This departure allows both Ovid and Machiavelli to reassess the status of erotic desire. For Lucretius, erotic desire must be handled with extreme caution lest it entangle the mind in ruinous false beliefs and destroy the possibility of theoretical wisdom. Machiavelli, following Ovid, recommends a different course, in which happiness is achieved through the deliberate manipulation of erotic fantasy. For Machiavelli, staging erotic fantasies is an essential part of statecraft.

This article argues that the early chapters of Machiavelli's Discourses constitutes a deliberate rejection of the ways in which Rome had been described and evaluated in the humanist political literature of the quattrocento and especially Poggio Bracciolini's Oration on Behalf of Venice. While agreeing with Poggio that early humanist portraits of Rome had been too idealized to be historically accurate, Machiavelli criticizes Poggio's own more critical view of Roman republicanism on both historical and theoretical grounds. Adapted from the source document.

This article argues that Skinnerian contextualism is an unsuccessful attempt to develop a truly methodical approach to textual interpretation. According to Skinner, the various 'mythologies' that he associates with textualism are due to its misplaced confidence in the faculty of judgment. Whereas textualists believe that an interpreter's own judgment is his or her most useful tool in attempting to understand a text, contextualism proceeds from the assumption that we cannot help but make faulty judgments when confronted with historical materials given the nature of human cognition. Having dissociated itself from textualism on these grounds, contextualism attempts to repair the defects of textualism by minimizing the role of judgment in interpretive practice. As this article will show, these efforts have been fruitless. Moreover, Skinner's attempt to reinforce contextualism by importing claims about the strategic motives behind philosophical argumentation is either incoherent or unconvincing. Adapted from the source document.

This article argues that Skinnerian contextualism is an unsuccessful attempt to develop a truly methodical approach to textual interpretation. According to Skinner, the various 'mythologies' that he associates with textualism are due to its misplaced confidence in the faculty of judgment. Whereas textualists believe that an interpreter's own judgment is his or her most useful tool in attempting to understand a text, contextualism proceeds from the assumption that we cannot help but make faulty judgments when confronted with historical materials given the nature of human cognition. Having dissociated itself from textualism on these grounds, contextualism attempts to repair the defects of textualism by minimizing the role of judgment in interpretive practice. As this article will show, these efforts have been fruitless. Moreover, Skinner's attempt to reinforce contextualism by importing claims about the strategic motives behind philosophical argumentation is either incoherent or unconvincing.