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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2009
Lawson's world is providential; it is a world under the auspices of an allpowerful and, no doubt, ultimately rational God. It is also a world of the uncertain, unreliable and fortuitous, explicable in terms of the clash of human perceptions, fears and ambitions. The jostling shadows of Augustine and Guicciardini might seem to make for a particularly murky text, for modern scholars have taught us to treat the idioms of fortune and providence as sufficiently separate for them to be given discrete histories. So the rise of an idiom of contingency is seen as a distinct and major factor in the beginning of modern political and historiographical sensibilities. But Lawson was in fact in no way unusual in combining and deploying alternately what were for him only distinguishable modes of explanation. Indeed, in his world even a consistent emphasis on the contingent seems embedded in the providential. Such an idiomatic symbiosis is typical of de facto theory, and is manifest in the histories of the English Revolution. Even Machiavelli, whose thought might be seen plausibly as the apotheosis of the idiom of fortune, finds providence to hand when he needs it. The self-conscious resolutions of potential tension between the claims of providence and fortune seem to have stopped well short of the obliteration of one by the other. Philippe de Commynes (1445–1509), an historian adniired by Lawson (Exam. 42), remarks that references to fortune could be little more than a poetic way of referring to God's providence.
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