The Prince | Critical Overview
Almost as soon as it was published in 1532, The Prince was derided as a controversial, heretical work. Sidney Angelo collected a handful of these early reviews that he found during his research:
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we find Machiavelli depicted as the very hand of the devil; as an "imp" of Satan, as "hell-bourne", as a "damnable fiend" of the underworld, as the "great monster-master of hell." John Donne once went so far as to describe a vision of the netherworld in which Machiavelli, attempting to gain a place in Lucifer's...
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