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Revising the History of Machiavellism: English Machiavellism and the Doctrine of Things Indifferent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Victoria Kahn
Victoria Kahn*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

We should be careful since not all indifferent things which appear indifferent are. Florentines can disguise and color any thing; and it is now adays the common exercise of the greatest wits of the world to transform good into evil, evil into good, and both into indifferent; so that in these days scant any thing is as it appears, or appears as it is.

In linking the rhetorical machinations of the “Florentine” or stereotypical Machiavel with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological and political debate concerning the doctrine of “things indifferent,” this quotation from William Bradshaw invites us to reconsider the usual histories of Machiavellism in Renaissance England. In particular, it suggests that the association of Machiavelli with rhetoric in the English Renaissance is more complicated than it might first appear.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1993 , pp. 526 - 561
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1993

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