This book examines Machiavelli in contemporary or past realities through the way in which he read, wrote, related to cultures distant in time and space—a first in the field of Machiavellian studies. It proposes and experiments with a change of perspective: in essence, it is not interested in what Machiavelli probably was, but in what Machiavelli did. In this perspective, Machiavelli remains a paradoxically still little-explored historical case. Issues and methods developed in recent decades by intellectual history, the history of reading, and cultural anthropology have remained substantially unfamiliar to Machiavelli scholars. This is a book that renews the vision of Machiavelli: no longer the starting or finishing point of intellectual genealogies that are often openly ideological, but an extraordinary case study that allows us to analyse the birth, in the sixteenth century, of a composite knowledge specifically dedicated to man in society.
