Marginal Reactions: Responses to Translations of Machiavelli in Early Modern English Marginalia

Marginalia create a space; or, they enter a space to which they had been invited by the very layout of the text. Over the last thirty years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the book as a physical site of sharing acquired special importance in early modern Europe, and I would like to enter this debate by looking at a very special group of texts: the manuscript and printed translations of Machiavelli’s Principe circulating in early modern England. The Principe did not appear in print in English until 1640; however, the text was far from unknown in earlier times. A number of copies in Italian, French and Latin circulated, and there was a significant dissemination of English manuscript translations. This generated a fluctuating, flexible text; readers established a close relation with a book that, admired and hated, was made it into a locus of discussion and intervention. Comments, marginalia, extracts and marks populate the written page of Machiavelli’s text. They may condemn the cynicism of Machiavelli’s political proposal, but more often the text is interrogated as a repository of historical exempla or a collector of political maxims, while its translations (as shown, once more, by marginalia) are used by English readers as part of the process of learning Italian.