Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton.

Victoria Kahn has written a significant counterpart to her 1985 study of Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance. Applying the similar principle of discovering and then analyzing how the reading public received a text, she offers a stimulating, challenging, and learned account of how intellectuals, mainly in Italy and England, read The Prince and the Discourses.

The early part of the book lays out Machiavelli's immediate two-fold legacy to these readers: that of being both a republican thinker and a political analyst. Because his heirs quickly realized that rhetorical analysis could become a key to working out political riddles, Kahn devotes most of her attention to this issue. Machiavelli supplied the clue to this awareness through his focus on the concept of virtu. Hence many of his readers were obliged to conclude that "the problems of political innovation in the realm of contingency that the new prince encounters are rhetorical problems: problems that cannot be resolved by applying fixed moral principles on the one hand or mere force on the other, problems whose solutions are inextricable from the use of imitation, representation, and persuasion. Thus rhetoric is not simply an instrument of virtu but is also analogous to virtu in the sense that both are faculties for responding to the realm of contingency or fortune; and virtu is rhetorical because what counts as virtu is produced from within a rhetorical analysis of the circumstances at hand and varies accordingly. Political innovation proves to be inseparable from rhetorical invention" (17).

A convenient transition to a discussion of the English readers of Machiavelli is Giovanni Botero's treatise Ragion di stato, published in 1589. Although Machiavelli had been officially on the papal index of prohibited books for thirty years, Counter-Reformation critics - with Botero in the vanguard - proposed a Christian reason of state based on both a frank appraisal of what "was threatening in Machiavelli's rhetorical politics and what was open to appropriation or reinterpretation" (61). Indeed, "what distinguishes Botero's prince from Machiavelli's is not a truer representation of the virtues or even truer interests but - so Botero claims - a more powerful use of them" (83). Kahn's argument is that this perception was paralleled by English Catholic and Protestant writers alike during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Kahn devotes the second half of her study to discerning and then discussing these affinities by exploring first how Machiavelli was read and then how that reading found its way into several key theological debates. To accomplish the first part of her plan she examines Stephen Gardiner's treatise Ragionamento dell'advenimento delli inglesi et normanni in Britanni (edited and translated by Peter Samuel Donaldson and published in 1975), the Maxims of State and The Cabinet. Council (Sir Walter Ralegh?), Bacon's The Advancement of Learning, and Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Among these authors she distinguishes the "domesticated," the "methodical," and the "dialectical" Machiavelli, that is, the writer who is made palatable in terms both of his rhetoric and of his ideas, the writer who is worthy of imitation because of his method of arguing, and the writer who is "read both as a Machiavel and as a critic of tyranny" (93). This phase of her argument is reinforced by a brief discussion of the prefaces to the editions and translations of Machiavelli's works available in Renaissance England.

In fulfilling the second part of her plan she investigates how Machiavelli figured in several key religious debates. The question in her fifth chapter is less how Machiavelli directly influenced the content of these controversies but how "the topics of Machiavellism and the figure of the Machiavel crystallized contemporary concerns about sovereignty and obedience, legitimate and illegitimate power, authority and dissent" (132-33). Ranging from Henry VIII's break with Catholicism and the Act of Supremacy, through the crisis precipitated in the 1640s and the civil war, to the efforts of Cromwell to force allegiance to his government in the Engagement Controversy, Kahn carefully lays the groundwork for her extensive discussion of John Milton.

Branching out from an examination of the doctrine of adiaphora or things indifferent - that is of "actions, beliefs, ceremonies, [and] objects which are not necessary for salvation" (135) - circulated during the debates over the Act of Supremacy, Kahn takes up Milton the theorist and especially Milton the poet in closely argued chapters first on virtue and virtu in Comus and then on the Machiavellian rhetoric of Paradise Lost as Satan articulates it first in Books I and 2, then in his encounter with Sin and Death, and finally in "his rhetoric in prelapsarian Eden" (210).

It should be clear from this summary that Kahn's book is not merely a reexamination of the English face of Machiavelli or of the "reason of state" literature. Kahn's readings of how Renaissance readers read the texts she investigates are innovative and valuable. Whether she is reading Machiavelli on Agathocles and Cesare Borgia in The Prince, or chapters in the Discourses, essays by Francis Bacon, Volumnia's speeches in Coriolanus, or the verse of Milton's Comus and Paradise Lost, historians, political theorists, and literary critics all must attend to and delight in her subtle, informed, and convincing readings.

JAMES B. ATKINSON Cornish, New Hampshire