Nicholas Machiavel’s Prince. Also, the life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca.
First edition in English of Machiavelli’s famous handbook for rulers (1513, published Rome 1532), dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, ruler of Florence from 1513.
The Prince appears to have been banned from publication in England during the Elizabethan period, though translations circulated in manuscript. It was so controversial that it had to wait for over a century, and was the last of Machiavelli’s great works, to be published in English. Even then, Dacres found it politic to frame the book with moral reservations or “animadversions”, though he did not allow them to seep into his text as did later translators Nevile and Farneworth; he also resisted more than they did the temptation to improve on Machiavelli’s style by rhetorical embellishments.
“Hitherto political speculation had tended to be a rhetorical exercise based on the implicit assumption of Church or Empire.
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