Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

The reputation of the Florentine politician, political thinker, and writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) has been largely shaped by his controversial political treatises, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. However, Machiavelli left us a broader and diverse corpus of writings. This dissertation focuses on what is perhaps the least-known portion of this corpus: Machiavelli’s poetry. Traditionally, scholars of Machiavelli have considered his engagement with poetry as a narrow and marginal component of his intellectual biography. Conversely, this project showcases how Machiavelli’s poetic activity, which he pursued throughout the vast majority of his adult life, intersected a broad spectrum of human and intellectual concerns, cultural practices, and social interactions. In light of this, poetry provides a unique opportunity to reassess the figure of Machiavelli across its full range of dimensions. Concurrently, Machiavelli’s poetic writings offer valuable insight into the manifold roles that poetry could play in the cultural and social world of Renaissance Florence. To illustrate the scope of Machiavelli’s poetic activity, this dissertation analyzes selections of Machiavelli’s political, amorous, and comic poems. In Chapter 1, devoted to Machiavelli’s political poetry, I address the three poems On Fortune, On Ingratitude, and On Ambition (also known as the Capitoli on account of their meter). I begin by assessing how Florence’s tradition of civic and poetic rhetoric influenced Machiavelli’s three poems, which allows me to then elucidate how the poems fit into Machiavelli’s anthropological-political laboratory. Indeed, my analysis shows how a rhetorically-informed approach facilitates the task of interpreting Machiavelli’s political thought across prose and poetry. In Chapter 2, I look at Machiavelli’s love poetry in relation to notions of desire, gender, and sexuality. Specifically, I focus on two poems that appear to voice homoerotic desire as well as on the two poems that Machiavelli addressed to the Florentine courtesan, virtuosa, and poet Barbera (b. 1500). My analysis highlights two complementary functions that the practice of love poetry had for Machiavelli and his contemporaries. On the one hand, love poetry was a vehicle for articulating reflections on love, gender, and sexuality. On the other, the practice of love poetry facilitated an array of homosocial and mixed-gender interactions. In Chapter 3, I move on to consider Machiavelli’s comic poetry. In particular, I analyze Machiavelli’s three sonnets to Giuliano de’ Medici and his two political epigrams. In so doing, I foreground how Machiavelli’s comic poetry intertwined humor and gravity by leveraging four ingredients: wordplay, parody, satire, and gallows humor. As part of my analysis, I also call attention to the role that those ingredients played in some literary and social practices of the Italian Renaissance.

Democracy seems to be in crisis and scholars have started to consider the possibility that “the only game in town” might be rigged. This book theorizes the crisis of democracy from a structural point of view, arguing that liberal representative governments suffer from systemic corruption, a form of political decay that should be understood as the oligarchization of society, and proposes an anti-oligarchic institutional solution based on a radical interpretation of republican constitutional thought. If one agrees that the minimal normative expectation of liberal democracies is that governments should advance the welfare of the majority within constitutional safeguards, increasing income inequality and the relative immiseration of the majority of citizens would be in itself a deviation from good rule, a sign of corruption. As a way to understand how we could revert the current patterns of political corruption, the book provides an in-depth analysis of the institutional, procedural, and normative innovations to protect political liberty proposed by Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicolas de Condorcet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt. Because their ideas to institutionalize popular power have consistently been misunderstood, instrumentalized, demonized, or neglected, part of what this project wants to accomplish is to offer a serious engagement with their proposals through a plebeian interpretative lens that renders them as part of the same intellectual tradition. In this way, the book assembles a “B side” of constitutional thought composed of the apparent misfits in a tradition that has been dominated by the impulse to suppress conflict instead of harnessing its liberty-producing properties. As a way to effectively deal with systemic corruption and oligarchic domination, the book proposes to follow this plebeian constitutionalism and instituionalize popular collective power. A proposed plebeian branch would be autonomous and aimed not at achieving self-government or direct democracy, but rather at an effort to both judge and censor elites who rule. The plebeian branch would consist of two institutions: a decentralized network of radically inclusive local assemblies, empowered to initiate and veto legislation as well as to exercise periodic constituent power, and a delegate, surveillance office able to enforce decisions and impeach public officials. The establishment of primary assemblies at the local level would not only allow ordinary people to push back against oligarchic domination through the political system but also inaugurate an institutional conception of the people as the many assembled locally: a political collective agent operating as a network of political judgment in permanent flow. The people as network would be a political subject with as many brains as assemblies, in which collective learning, reaction against domination, and social change would occur organically and independently from representative government and political parties.

Renaissance and Baroque drama offers a view into gender dynamics of the time. What is seen is a development in the allowed expression and manifestation of desire by females, beginning from a point of near silence, and arriving at points of verbal statement and even physical violence. Specifically, in La Mandragola by Niccolò Machiavelli, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, and Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega, there appears a chronological progression, whereby using desire and its expression as a metric in conjunction with modern concepts of gender and sexuality to measure a shift in relation to what is and is not allowed to be expressed by women. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection