Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513-1515.

John M. Najemy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. xiii + 358 pp. $39.50.

The author modestly calls his book an essay, which is the only false note in what must be hailed as a beautifully crafted and original contribution to Machiavelli studies. Najemy's contribution is based not on the discovery of unpublished sources -- the wellspring of past and present Renaissance scholarship -- as one might have anticipated from his former publications on Florentine guilds, but on an empathic and comprehensive reading of the letters exchanged between Machiavelli and Francesco Vettori. Without the editorial labors of Franco Gaeta, Giorgio Inglese, Mario Martelli, and Enrico Niccolini, among others, and the recent biography of Vettori by Rosemary Devonshire Jones, this book would have been difficult, if not impossible, to write. Some of the letters, of course, are especially well known -- like that of 9 April 1513, when Machiavelli announced that fortune compelled him to talk about politics, and that of 10 December 1513, when he poignantly described his life in exile from Florence and announced the composition of his little work on princedoms. Yet by viewing Machiavelli's political reflections on power and domination as an extension of his rhetorically and emotionally charged relationship with Vettori, Najemy offers a radically new context for interpreting The Prince.

The importance of their correspondence is underscored by the remarkable fact that of the 83 extant letters written by Machiavelli (apart from letters written in an official capacity) a total of twenty-nine, or 35 percent, were addressed to Vettori. The intimate, seemingly digressive character of the letters, however, has unfortunately led scholars to treat them largely as supplementary sources of information serving to explain this or that passage in Machiavelli's political, literary, or historical works. In contrast, Najemy treats their correspondence as a profoundly literary and self-conscious product of "joint authorship." He is the first scholar to truly consider Vettori as Machiavelli's intellectual equal, as well as his friend and professional colleague. Their correspondence, he insists, should not be read as a progressive unfolding of ideas leading inexorably to the masterpieces bearing Machiavelli's name. Zigzagging across emotional and intellectual frontiers, their letters are punctuated by wordless mutual understandings, sparrings, and even ruptures that arc just as meaningfully as the sequence of words on which the Machiavelli industry has lavished so much attention.

Najemy contextualizes his analysis of the letters with an informative discussion of Renaissance letter writing. Another chapter deals with the education, public careers, and families of both Vettori and Machiavelli, respectively. Najemy highlights the differences between the two, which resulted in tensions that would surface in their later correspondence. Machiavelli descended from a solid but not a politically or socially prominent family, while Vettori was a patrician and scion of one of the city's illustrious families. Machiavelli excelled in drafting diplomatic dispatches marked by astute advice and judgments; he was also a good Latinist and was entranced by precedents of Roman history, but unlike his humanist contemporaries, he did not engage in Latin composition and had only a smattering of Greek. Vettori, in comparison, was an accomplished humanist, but, curiously, he was skeptical that the models of political wisdom and conduct transmitted by high-minded literary tradition could serve as effective guides in the tumultuous world of early sixteenth-century Italy. By the time their correspondence got under way in 1513, Machiavelli was considered an enemy of the new Medicean regime and had been sent into exile, while Vettori had been rewarded with the appointment of Florentine ambassador to Rome.

In brief, what emerges from Najemy's contextualist reading of their letters is that Machiavelli and Vettori had clashing visions of language and politics. Neither political discourse nor events, according to Vettori, stem from reason; rather, they arise from accumulated customs and habits. His skepticism about the correspondence between words and events and his demotion of political discourse to guesswork was meant to be an explicit rejection of Machiavelli's conviction that the words and actions of rulers are not arbitrary nor dictated by fate but amenable to reason and so rectifiable and controllable. Responding to Vettori's critique, Machiavelli elaborated his thesis that princes who establish and maintain power and security can indeed impose their will on the world -- a theme that culminated in The Prince. By implication, the intertextual presence of Vettori in The Prince looms so large that he could, and perhaps should, be considered as co-author. This heretical implication, along with others that make the book sparkle, will surely be scrutinized by specialists, and certainly resisted by those who cling to the paradigm of the author-as-genius. Najemy's brilliant book is a must-read for any serious student of the Renaissance.