Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (review)

278 Short Notices to delineate the exact scope of his book: feudalism in the 'narrow, technical, legal sense of the word', as it existed in the regions between the Loire and the Rhine between the eighth and thirteenth centuries. His focus is on the two institutions in which this feudalism was embodied: vassalage and the fief. This book has had a lengthy life. First appearing in French editions in 1944 and 1947, its translation into English in 1950 was greeted with acclaim by English and American reviewers. The English version was subsequently revised for a second edition in 1961 and a thud in 1964. This n e w printing, in the series of reprints for teaching issued by the Medieval Academy of America, brings the third edition back into print after some years' absence. The reprint is a photographic one and no attempt has been m a d e to amend the text or the select bibliography in thetightof the scholarship of the last thirty years. It is evidence of the enduring quality and value of Ganshof's book that it can still be used profitably by undergraduates in its original form, and that it is sttil the best short introduction to vassalage and the fief in the Middle Ages. This reprint is therefore very welcome. Toby Burrows Scholars' Centre The University of Western Australia Library Kahn, Victoria, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation Milton, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994; pp. xv, 314; R.R.P. US$29.50, £23.50. Victoria Kahn's Machiavellian Rhetoric offers an innovative approach to the reading and reception of the works of Machiavelli and is a valuable addition to the corpus of research produced by scholars such as Raab, Pocock, Skinner and Worden. The book argues that the Machiavelli of force and fraud, the 'rhetorical Machiavel', is not simply the result of a naive reading of his works, but m a y be understood as a 'rhetorical dimension of his political theory' (p. 4). The primary objective of this investigation is to provide a revised history of Renaissance Machiavellism 'that sees the Machiavel and the Short Notices 279 republican as equally valid and related readings of Machiavelli's work' (p. 4). Kahn acknowledges that the image of the Machiavel could function independently of the author's work. This is an important caveat and one which is occasionally ignored. Milton, for example, was familiar with the political sentiments expressed in the Discorsi. His only direct reference to the 'Florentine Secretary', however, utilises the popular, pejorative signification. The reader requires no famtiiarity with Itatian prose to understand the meaning behind Milton's branding of the English clergy as 'MachiaveUian Priest[s]' (An Apology against a Pamphlet in Complete Prose Works, Yale, 1953, Vol. I, p. 908). Milton was merely employing a signifier which with time and frequency of use had become divorced from its original context. As Kahn's quotation from Clarendon suggests, Englishmen w h o had not read MachiaveUi's prose sttil understood the meaning of the term 'Machiavel' (p. 3). The idea that the powerful Renaissance images which portray the Machiavel as a figure of force and guile were initiated by a rhetorical reading of the works of MachiaveUi, and that this interpretation 'gave rise to anxieties associated with Machiavelli's divorce of poUtics from ethics' (p. x), is an insightful and intriguing observation. Yet although the book deals with reader reception it fails to examine closely the cultural and political forces at work which might have prescribed this meaning. Such a study would be a useful adjunct to this book. It would reveal whether readers' interpretation of the works of Machiavelli was personal and spontaneous or whether forces existed within the inteUectual consciousness of the Church and state which poticed its meaning. Victoria Kahn is currently based at the University of California, where she is in the process of preparing her n e w book for publication. Tentatively entitled The Romance of Contract: The Rhetoric of Political Obligation in England 1640-74, this work wtil be eagerly anticipated by aU students interested in the study of seventeenth-century England. Robert Hallam Department of English University of Western Australia ...