Machiavelli in Love

Ruggiero provides challenging accounts of public ethics and private morality by analysing a selection of literary and archival material. Armed with humour and determination, he deciphers the subtle codes of Renaissance narratives, and comments on the various ways in which identity and sexuality were constructed, understood and politicised.

This is a veteran historian’s book of literary speculation... It is also, I suspect, a teacher’s book. It favors texts that enliven an English-speaking classroom on Italian history both because they support good lessons and because they bring students into engagement with the Italian past. How better to stir up Anglo-Saxon students, after all, than with tales, tragic or comical, that touch on passion, tenderness, deception, loss, or ribaldry!

Written in the accessible narrative style that Ruggiero’s readers will recognize, the study is a lively investigation that raises a central question about how the construction of self was dependent on sexual reputation.

Ultimately makes a remarkable case for the integration of individual and societal identity within an understanding of the Italian Renaissance.

Having to think creatively and act daringly under changing circumstances, this diaspora presents scholars with a fascinating and complex challenge of probing a spectrum of hybrid, fluid, and shifting identities.

Suggestive new readings of an unusual range of texts.

A book that no one will be able to ignore in historical, gender, and Italian literary studies. Here Ruggiero breaks new ground, especially with his keen eye for connecting fiction with social experience.