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Writing and the Paradox of the Self: Machiavelli’s Literary Vocation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

John Bernard
John Bernard*
Affiliation:
University of Houston, The Honors College
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Abstract

The respective roles of virtù and fortuna, never resolved in his political writings, are critical to understanding Machiavelli’s literary evolution. As his letters suggest, in the years between the fall of the Soderini republic and his reentry into public life with Mandragola, Machiavelli came to understand the power of language to impose order on the anarchy of events. The fragmentary L’Asino records his discovery that writing can achieve an agency denied to princes. Mandragola’s dialectic between the author and his protagonist demonstrates that the inventive plasticity of the writer is grounded in the inherent stability of the creative self.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , Spring 2006 , pp. 59 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This essay is an expansion of a paper delivered at the 2003 RSA conference in Toronto. The author wishes to thank his fellow panelists, Donald Beecher, Olga Zorzi Pugliese, and Raymond Waddington, as well as members of the audience, for helpful suggestions and corrections to his arguments.

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