1982/12/01 by John M. Najemy
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Renaissance and Early Modern Studies #Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
paper · doi:10.2307/2861371
Some years ago, Felix Gilbert observed that alone among Machiavelli's writings the Florentine Histories had not yet found a defined place in the interpretations of their author's intellectual development. This is less true today than it was then, owing in part to the work of Gilbert himself but also to that of other interpreters of Machiavelli storico, such as Carlo Dionisotti, Marina Marietti, Gian Mario Anselmi, and still others. Whereas Gilbert then rightly claimed that “the case of the Istorie Fiorentine is peculiar because the judgments about this work vary so fundamentally that they cannot even be narrowed down to issues on which a dispute could focus,” the very paper in which this observation was made proceeded admirably to identify several important issues on which future discussions of the Florentine Histories would have to turn.