Ai margini del testo: Alberico Gentili e la circolazione dell’opera di Machiavelli in Inghilterra

Published for the first time in 1532, Niccolò Machiavelli’s Principe immediately triggered much controversy, in both Catholic countries (where the circulation of the book would soon be checked by the Index librorum prohibitorum) and Protestant ones, where the Florentine writer was soon identified with the Jesuits’ wiles and stratagems. A printed translation of the Principe would appear only over a century after its first appearance; but an Italian edition was published in London in 1584, printed by John Wolfe, with whom Alberico Gentili had worked from the beginning of his Oxford career, in 1581. Such proximity has encouraged scholars to hypothesize an involvement on Gentili’s part in the production of this volume, as well as of the twin volume of the Discorsi, published by Wolfe in the same year. My paper will explore this hypothesis, given also what Gentili writes of Machiavelli in his De legationibus. A survey of the political and cultural milieu in which Gentili moved during his early years in England (as a friend of Sir Philip Sidney, of the French ambassador Michel de Castelnau, possibly of Giordano Bruno) will also help reconstruct an important element of the reception of Machiavelli’s works in England, showing how Gentili opposed a strictly political argument to the sometimes hysterical reactions of his contemporaries, from John Case to the Elizabethan playwrights.