SOURCE: "Proverbial Signs: Formal Strategies in Guicciardini's Ricordi," Annali d'Italianistica, Vol. 2, 1984, pp. 94-109.

[In the following essay, Struever suggests that Guicciardini presented his Ricordi as a set of proverbs in order to express important ethical ideas in a traditional and therefore intimate, accessible form.]

As long ago as 1939, Felix Gilbert demonstrated the usefulness of a textual analysis of the moral-political discourse of the Renaissance. He argued that a fundamental political reorientation can be diagnosed in the alterations in the genre of advice or counsel, for example, in reading Machiavelli's Prince as a transformation of medieval and humanist "Mirrors for Princes."¹ Since then, of course, Quentin Skinner, appealing to the initiatives of analytic philosophy of language, has advocated a more sophisticated project: the formal redescription of the Prince as a series of "speech-acts." Yet the fundamental assumption remains the same: for both Gilbert and Skinner, the structure of political rhetoric reveals rhetoric as politics, discourse as action.² Since a traditional exercise in the definition of Florentine political thought has been the comparison of Machiavellian and Guicciardinian achievement, it seems to follow that a formal analysis of Guicciardini's political rhetoric would be useful. I shall argue that the Ricordi, the collection of observations, exhortations and maxims which presents a telling example of the state of the art of political and moral advice in Florence in the early sixteenth century, is central to the vital Guicciardinian difference. I shall also claim that the strength and unity of his differential contribution relates to the proverbial form of the Ricordi.

A major focus of modern scholarship on the Ricordi has been the definitive establishment of the texts of the five successive redactions of the maxims. These redactions, available in the 1951 critical edition of R. Spongano, include two very early lists of maxims of 1512, the second adding 16 new ricordi to the original 13; a much larger collection of 161 maxims, retaining only 8 from the 1512 lists, was produced in the period 1523-25; a fourth redaction of 1528, which contains all of the ricordi of 1512 as well as all of the previous collection, plus 12 new ricordi; and the final redaction of 1530 which contains 91 new ricordi plus 130 from earlier collections, many of them radically revised. The concern with the redactions has been a concern with progressive change in the text. The central issue, of course, is the direction and force of the intellectual movement between versions, an issue E. Scarano Lugnani addresses in her monograph, Guicciardini e la crisi del Rinascimento.³ First, she notes the deepening of the political theoretical interests in the third redaction, accompanied in places by the elimination of "municipal" interests, the specifically Florentine references of the early ricordi. The municipal concern returns in the fourth redaction of 1528, an urban interest which, she speculates, reflects Guicciardini's preoccupation with the contemporary Florentine political crisis. The fifth redaction represents a radical transformation on the plane of internal organisation as well as in selection of content; the tone is now "exquisitely" theoretical and contemplative. Thus, for example, where there had been a nourishing reciprocity between example and rule in the third version, in the fifth collection, according to Lugnani, the maxim absorbs totally the illustrative event, depriving it of any autonomous interest; the concrete and particular event is now mere example.

I wish to argue, however, the essential unity of the Ricordi, a unity grounded in the constraints of proverbial form.⁴ My interest lies in characterizing Guicciardini's exploitation of the ricordi form as both a cognitive tactic and a moral act: my premise is that "proverb" and "maxim" represent a meta-discursive strategy, a sign system or code which reorients the reader to political-moral reality.⁵ Lugnani has raised the issue of the relation of the Ricordi to Guicciardini's major texts in claiming that it is in the ricordi of 1523-25 that the major themes of Guicciardini's mature work, specifically the History of Italy, are first isolated. My claim is that the proverbial form dominates the Ricordi, where it is employed by Guicciardini to both intensify and enlarge political consciousness and moral sensitivity, and thus makes a heavy contribution to the thematic structure of Guicciardini's history.⁶

But first, any analysis of Guicciardini's use of the ricordo form must begin with his self-conscious statements about the Ricordi as discursive practice. In these statements the ricordo takes its place in a semantic field composed of proverb ("proverbio" 97), saying ("detto" 163), rule ("regola" 111), and maxim ("massima" 192). The congruence of the ricordo and proverb form is attested by the instances where the ricordi are simply versions of proverbs. This is the case in ricordo 136, a restatement of the classical tag "Audaces fortuna iuvat"; or 138, a reissue of "Ducent volentes fata, nolentes trahunt"; and 163, an updating of "Magistratus virum ostendit." Or, a ricordo may attempt either to correct an "antico proverbio" (96), or to make a strong and concrete case for its validity (33, 54, 116, 144).

Then, Guicciardini appeals to a proverb to criticise the proverbial strength of the Ricordi as practice; in ricordo 210 he begins, "'Poco e buono' dice el proverbio" ("'Less is more,' says the proverb,") and then raises the question whether he has diluted his message by producing too many ricordi. Verbosity must contain nonsense, he says, while economy is easily digested: a selection ("fiore") might have been better.

Here Guicciardini recognises economy as formal value. And certainly it is the case that any account of the proverbial form must stipulate the criterion of economy. In the proverb, a skeletal prose purveys skeletal premises; it is a severe statement of guarded expectations of human behavior. The simplicity of form is designed to obtain sophistication of response; the minimum of descriptive effort is to achieve a maximum of critical response, by means of the elimination or reduction of naive assumptions and superfluous inferences. Where the proverb is preceptive, it is designed to limit the exposure of designated action to the least possible amount of speculative damage. Proverbial effect relates to the piquancy of stating broad imperatives in a language of narrow surprises; general assent or inclusive attitudes are constituted by means of incisive raids upon a domain of cherished beliefs and shared moral truisms. Used within the context of serious investigation, the preferred use of proverb is as a folk wisdom which subverts folk cant.

But if a primary attribute of the proverbial form is economy, a primary value of a collection of proverbs is richness. Just so, Terence Cave has emphasised the complementarity of the criteria of brevitas and copia in sixteenth-century literary theory and practice; Erasmus' Adagia, indeed, is "a stylish example of the marriage of copia and brevitas" (20-21). Brevity in the adage "Festina lente" is described as "gem-like"; that is, a small compassable unit which is both enduring and resettable, a relocatable brilliance.⁷ Complementarity of brevity and richness, or unitas and varietas, invests the single proverb as well. In a contemporary humanist collection of proverbs, Filippo Beroaldo claims that proverbs are "similar to laws, in that a narrow text gives rise to the widest possible interpretation; contained by the greatest brevity, they unfold the most fruitful meaning."⁸

And thus the generative complementarity of brevitas and copia affects the cognitive strategy of the proverbial form. At issue, of course, is the fit of the proverbial form in the general argument of the receiving text, and thus the relation of general and specific, rule and experience. Within the context of his inclusive political-historical project, Guicciardini wishes to give a pragmatic (useful) account of events; he is constrained, because he starts with obdurate and resistant events, to argue backwards, to search, as the rhetorician searches, for general lines of argument, topoi, which will account for the events. Aristotle specified in his Rhetoric that maxims can function as major premisses in an argument; they supply a general or common meaning which can be applied to specific events in conclusions.⁹ The proverbial tactic is one of epistemological clarification and deconstruction; as major premiss, it dismantles other, less economical premisses. The proverbs accomplish "home truths" by eschewing claims with systematic or academic resonances; proverbial tactics evince a distrust of syllogistic chains of propositions, lengthy argumentative development.

Proverbial form, then, qualifies generality and the relation of rule and example, instantiation and maxim. But whereas Lugnani claimed that the redactions evince a development in the direction of generality where maxim "swallows" event, Hess has characterised the aphoristic relation of universal and individual in Guicciardini as a tension: they subsist in a dialectical mode in the sense that each is incomplete without the other.¹⁰ Further, one must note Guicciardini's pervasive tendency to focus on the reception or consumption as well as the production of maxim; proverbs "address" a unified body of producers/consumers. In ricordo 79, the unity of meaning must be subordinated to the variety of use. Specific circumstances of application may constrain a total reversal of import; thus the proverb "el savio debbe godere el beneficio del tempo" may stipulate either celerita (decisiveness) or procrastination. The relation of general to specific is certainly not a straightforward one in which genus exhaustively explains species. The proverbial appeal is to a wisdom, which, while it might cohere with the propositions developed in a formal Aristotelian or scholastic matrix, claims a diffuse collective origin. It specifies a domain of informal and irregular acts of invention and judgment, and provides, therefore, space for thought-experiment. Just as Cicero insists that the domain of juridical oratory is created by the fact that laws are not omnicompetent, and thus judges have discretion, so Guicciardini privileges the cases which cannot be decided by reference to law only, but require a jurisprudential strategy, a manner of adjudicating a variety of opinions (111, 113). The relation of species to species, of exemplary to imitative act, is equally aporetic: "to judge by example is very misleading," because tiny differences in contributing circumstances can cause great variations in effects (117, 114). The potential imitator of exemplary events, then, operates in a realm of contingency, judging, and reckoning "giornata per giornata" (114).

The Ricordi represent a deliberate strategy for gaining a different purchase on civil issue, a use of proverb to enter and change political debate. At the same time, the proverbs represent a direct and simple edifying address: both affirmations and subversions make unequivocal calls on judgment and act. For the proverb aims for the broadest popular recognisability; proverbial generality appeals to a continuity with traditional memory, and gives a suggestion of cross-cultural validity. The proverb, Guicciardini claims in ricordo 12, has universal application because it is a universal phenomenon; all nations have the same proverbs, even if expressed in different words, because they express the same resolution of similar experiences. And the verbal form of the proverb is of such rigidity that Guicciardini's ricordi confuse; the reader hesitates whether to judge them as newly-minted or obscurely archaic expressions (82, 140). The proverb is easily counterfeited; "artificial" proverbs, by virtue of the simplicity and rigidity of form, have the same force as "real" ones.

What I now claim is that a focus on this proverbial strategy enables a revision of one of Lugnani's characterisations of the Ricordi and the reinforcement of a second. First, Lugnani sees in the changes that took place between the early and late redactions a rejection of Florentine, municipal interests. My hypothesis is simply that Guicciardini's proverbial strategy represents the endurance, not cancellation of this municipalist motive. That is to say, the invocation of proverbial authority is at the same time an invocation of the communal wisdom familiar to, indeed, identified as, the collective possession of small-scale societies. The archetypal proverb is an appeal to a shared residual knowledge, which is the firm possession of unlettered or literate inhabitants of a social network. The attribute "communia" of proverbs is a shared assumption of both Guicciardini's Ricordi and contemporaneous humanist collections; indeed, the notion of communality underwrites a continuity between "learned" and "popular" forms.¹¹ Then, Fubini (153ff.) notes that the successive redactions of the Ricordi demonstrate a progressive movement towards a more generic "literary" expression; yet, while removing local "Florentine" expressions, the author retains the originary vulgar force, and though he discards "Florentinity" he discards "Latinate" usage as well. Guicciardini is not so much repudiating municipalism as removing parochialism in order to raise urbane instruction to a more general, and therefore accessible, plane. Proverbs, the form and content of the Ricordi, both strengthen the Florentine claim to special wisdom and appeal to a general audience's nostalgia for small communal identity. A very specific instance of this appeal would be, of course, Guicciardini's tactic of attributing a saying to his father (44, 45); indeed, he also cites a source, Pope Leo, as attributing a saying to his father (25). Generality does not specify cosmopolitanism but intimacy and informality.

As we observe the intimate and informal quality of the social relations which are often the object of Guicciardinian investigation, we notice at once that a very high proportion of the Ricordi deal with the production and reception of "benefits," namely, not only the material rewards but also the offices, good will, trust, and advice which are the currency of civil society. Here, I might add, is a clear instance where Guicciardini does not appear as anti-classical, for there are very strong parallels with the theory and practice of benefits Seneca adumbrated in his De Beneficiis. Like Seneca, Guicciardini depicts a network of benefits as constituting the most important social bonds: "quae maxime humanam societatem alligat."¹² Both the Senecan and Guicciardinian initiatives focus on personal rather that institutional transactions; the choices depicted are not primarily choices of public policy, but of private, for example, familial needs. Thus, when Guicciardini intones "nothing is more precious than friends" (14), he refers to a thick discursive matrix where one's reputation, and thus power, is continuously assessed, voted up or down.

The Ricordi, then, stipulate and explain a peculiar domain of civil interest, but, most importantly, they indorse a particular tone and point of view in defining ethical values in this domain as well; to use the proverb is to engage in a peculiar type of moral work. Indeed, the strong appeal of the proverbial account relates to its moral claims; recall that Aristotle remarked that the maxim invests a speech with moral character: "There is moral character in every speech where the moral purpose is conspicuous, and maxims always produce this effect, because the utterance of them amounts to a general declaration of moral principles (1395b). Further, as Aristotle noted, the use of maxims has powerful effect because it authenticates the popular morality: "The maxim is a general statement, and people love to hear stated in general terms what they already believe in some particular connection" (1395b). This statement by no means establishes the superiority of general rule to specific insight. Indeed, the proverbial strategy in an interesting way undermines the project of the construction of an exhaustive set of eternal moral rules.¹³

Thus, proverbial universality is an appeal to shared capacity or possession and not ontological order. Further, while Guicciardini depicts and appeals to a heavy, vital, social network which is both confrontational and omnipresent, he also enjoins a peculiarly negative, almost quiescent moral capacity. This, I think, is the motive of Lugnani's claim that the Ricordi are cognitive and not preceptive in tone (73). Recall that in ricordo 9 Guicciardini asks his audience to read his maxims often and hold them in mind, for they are easier to understand than to observe. They must become a habit of mind, always fresh in the memory; in an earlier version he remarks that habit will insure that use will then seem as rational as it is easy (B11). Guicciardini's initiative is designed to shape attitudes or stances, rather than alternative policies (170, 176); when he enjoins his readers to hold a maxim deep in their hearts ("avessino bene nel cuore," 196), he wishes to induce a mental state of cognitive alertness. In the relations of rule and example (110), of book and experience (186), in his emphasis on discretion ("discrezione" 6), on thoughtfulness ("pensare" 83, B25), on reflection (152, 187, 215), he describes as desideratum a passive and receptive frame of mind, flexible and open to the variations of experience (10), the mixed nature of things (213). His skeletal prose construes a simple armature, a perceptive screen; proverbial injunctions enjoin a sieving activity which need not produce a fornula for heroic results.

"Cognitive" is not equivalent to "academic," of course; the emphasis on discretion and flexibility is also a deemphasis of book learning, ("dottrina," "libri" 186); reasoning not reading strengthens reflective capacity (187, 208). And his insistence on the bankruptcy of hindsight (22) and the impossibility of foresight or prophecy (23, 57, 58, 114, 176, 182, 207, 211) contribute to construing proper mentation as an almost empty readiness.

Further, proverbial constraints, in forcing epistemological pessimism, limit moral possibility. The Ricordi, which radically demarcate the domain of the real from that of the ideal, the realm of "is" from that of "ought," also contribute to the attenuation of the preceptive drive. In ricordo 128 and 179, what "ought to be" is not the proper object of cognition and investigative scrutiny, and therefore ceases to be a topic in the schooling of the will as well.¹⁴ The pessimism enjoins a still further refinement of the definition of the "real"; "real" becomes "the perception of the real." The ricordi which deal with benefit concern the success or failure of the benefit given to induce the receiver to perceive the benefit as gain (40, 42, 43, 44, 86); the benefit must operate in a domain of gratitude and ingratitude, of reputation of liberality or miserliness (42, 158, 185, 217), of designations of respect or offense (B148, B153).

We may detect in the proverbial strategy a general moment of interiorisation. If the proverbs describe or stipulate spiritual capacity, they also deal with goals as spiritual achievements. "Honor" becomes not so much a public charge as a private possession; true integrity of reputation is an assessment by the individual of his own attitudes and accomplishments. The Ricordi also define a temporal dimension to moral competence and public reputation. Memory is an enabling capacity; the Ricordi are useful, available in so far as they are remembered (9); benefits and offenses exist in a domain of memory (24, 25, 62, 130, 150, 207). Reputation, the vital ingredient of success, is shared memory, a consensual remembrance (42, 158, 217, 218). But Guicciardini, like Seneca, develops a phenomenology of memory which distinguishes function and dysfunction. Not simply benefit, but the memory of benefit creates social bonds; the moralist who engages in "healing souls and maintaining faith in human affairs," Seneca claims, also has the duty of "engraving upon minds the memory of services" (De Benef'ciis I.iv:6). Similarly, ingratitude, as destroying bonds, is a social evil; Guicciardini attacks the "malcontenti" as distorting political equations (131).¹⁵

Intimate domain and moral initiative are entwined, then; the Ricordi aim to provide a reflective command of intimate social relations; Guicciardini employs the proverbial form to generate a peculiarly thick description of moral competence within an informal social context. The specific and interesting locus of moral insight is the domain of benefits, a Senecan domain where benefits are a recalcitrant necessity: they are, on the one hand, the essential social cement or glue, and, on the other, extraordinarily hard to give and receive. Pessimism is, of course, constrained by the formal criterion of brevity; moral optimism requires an elaborate argument. Like Seneca, Guicciardini premises the essential fragility of human nature, its susceptibility to evil motives and forces: "malos esse nos, malos fuisse,—invitus adiciam, et futuros esse."¹⁶ But also like Seneca, Guicciardini enjoins purity of motive: a benefit entered into a calculus of loss and gain is not a benefit; the benefit lies in the generosity ("benevolentia") of intention.¹⁷

Discussions of virtuous purity are circumscribed by the de-reification tactics of the Ricordi. His few direct references to virtue concern the sphere of will and affect; at one point he describes the extreme satisfaction one gains from the repression of illicit desire (B17). Positive attributes are attributes of manner; Guicciardini does, at the end of the collection, produce a list of characteristics of a virtuous mode: "cioe fargli con ragione, con tempo, con modestia, e per cagione e con modi onorevoli" (217). There is, to be sure, ambiguity: one ricordo maintains that true merit lies in action rather than disavowals of inaction (129); another will, with infinite caution, claim that the greatest good is to harm no one (139).

"Harmlessness" denotes moral parsimony. And, in gene-ral, proverbial form represents and imitates proverbial capacity. The economy and elegance of the prose state, without excess, the economical premisses of the true state of affairs as a state of affective artifice. That is to say, the maxims are quintessentially proverbial as deconstructive of moralism, rather than reinforcing it, as humanist collections seem. The proverbial initiative, as spare and necessitous, inculcates habits of mind rather than political roles; it subverts law and inefficient ways of discussing moral issues; it insists on the limitation of the will, while addressing an audience from which it expects reasonable behavior; it underlines the importance of perception and reputation, and thus underscores the necessity of dissimulation and reticence as well as of frankness and liberality. The enunciation of proverb questions or even subverts the status of proverbial rule, which applies as hedge and constraint; every general injunction imposes a burden of specific and therefore difficult use. Indeed, the strategy denies fixed rules of action at the same time as it attempts to fix the potential to observe and reflect.

The issue which remains to be discussed is: What is the place of the Ricordi in Guicciardini's work as a whole? I have already cited Lugnani's remark that the major concepts of the History of Italy made their first appearance in the Ricordi; I have tried to make the case that the dominant proverbial form was at the same time a cognitive tactic and a moral strategy. Indeed, this choice of mode illumines the place of Guicciardini's work in Florentine political and historical thought as well. I shall claim that we must see the Ricordi as the product of a double initiative in Florentine moral-political inquiry, an initiative both traditional, in its proverbial appeal to a social wisdom of time immemorial, and revolutionary, partaking of the radical innovations of Machiavellian political analysis.

Or, the initiative may be judged traditional, radical, and classical. While he makes few references to classical protagonists or authors in the Ricordi, Guicciardini mentions Tacitus three times (C13, 18; B101); in ricordo 18, his observation that Tacitus spoke as much to the issue of how subjects can live under tyranny as to how tyrants can maintain their rule, is, I would argue, as much a summary of Guicciardini's program as of that of Tacitus.¹⁸ Just so, Machiavelli's Prince recapitulates this agenda: it is as much addressed to the task of accommodation to the failure of republican possibilities as to that of constructing a principate. Guicciardini, like Machiavelli, employs the shock tactics of depicting the current political dilemmas of tyranny in rich, compelling, and Tacitean detail. But in Guicciardini there is a specific commitment to the use of the proverbial form in order to authenticate a modus vivendi, a potential of endurance for a reader now defined as Tacitean subject rather than Ciceronian citizen. Certainly the careers of both Machiavelli and Guicciardini reflect the imperative that the subject with a capacity for generous endurance must embrace the role of counsellor. Guicciardini, when he claims that the subject of a principate has greater opportunities than the subject of a republic (107), describes these opportunities specifically as those of proverbial prudence.

The central assumption of the Ricordi, I have argued, is that the dominant matrix of all civic activity, both political and moral, is one of intimate obligation and benefit. By the relocation of virtuous activity within this intimate network of social bonds, Guicciardini is justifying the fundamental importance of a domain of intimate relations which persists within, or even encloses, the new political power structures. One of the tasks of the Ricordi is to refine and correct the distinction of public and private spheres by placing the public domain within the matrix of affect and then subordinating political action to the affective network.¹⁹ From this follows the transformation of the notion of "public" into "public perception": the politician functions in a realm of perceptions, reputations, deceptions, and self-deceptions. The very simple republican definitions of political space of earlier Renaissance "Civic Humanism" are effaced by this strategy; further, many maxims make specific contributions to the definition of the peculiarity of the princely domain.²⁰ Here the coherence of "public" and "political" entirely breaks down. The Ricordi stress not only the web of dissimulation which invests courtly activity, but insist on the opacity of the court to civic framework, of the palace to the forum: "often there is such a dense cloud or a thick wall between the palace and the market place that the human eye is unable to penetrate it" (141).²¹

This proverbial version of contextual challenge coheres with the notion of proverbial response; the account stipulates the isolation of the prince in a difficult environment, and thus severely circumscribes the possibilities of action of both prince and subject, immersed in an ambiance of opinion and affect, deception and interest.²² The prince must use benefit and punishment as both spur and bridle (B3), but use must be related to affective reality. Like Seneca, Guicciardini emphasises disparities in the phenomenology of memory: because of habits of self-deception (165), the subjects of a prince tend to overemphasise their own merit (26, 52); therefore, while their memory of benefits granted tends to be fleeting (24, 203), their resentments of injury are durable (23, 150). And because of their feckless optimism, hope is stronger than fear as motive (5, 62, 173). Thus Guicciardini also recommends to the prince evasiveness and time gaining tactics (36).²³

Then, Guicciardini offers counsels of affective prudence to counsellors as well as to the prince; the subject also must recognise that he has to operate within a realm of affective reality (151, 154). Guicciardini recalls Castiglione when he recommends to the subject the virtues of a prudential stylishness; intensely private graces and accomplishments may be the means to political achievement; deft gentility may gain the ear of the prince for the community good (179, 220). Thus proverbial strategy, by assuming an intimate politics, stresses the omnicompetence of proverbial wisdom; the same tactics control personal affairs and policy decisions (197, 198). The very existence of disinterested public motive is impugned by Guicciardinian cynicism; expressions of an ideology of liberty, he claims, are more likely expressions of self-interest (66). Both proverbial omnicompetence and the omnipresence of dysfunctional affect blur the definitions of public and private. Where a topos of civic humanist history, such as Leonardo Bruni's History of Florence, was the necessity for separation of public and private interests and the condemnation of the private use of public power, Guicciardini recommends the talent of "His Catholic Majesty" in representing actions for his own interests as actions for the common good (142).

In contrast, J. G. A. Pocock is probably correct in seeing Machiavelli as "Civic Humanist" in his retention of a well-defined public political sphere.²⁴ There are, to be sure, broad similarities in Machiavellian and Guicciardinian strategies: they share, obviously, premisses of the fragility and mobility of human affairs. However, they agree not so much on a simple premiss of the evil of human nature as on a complicated awareness of the necessity of dissimulation. Their emphasis on the dominant matrix of perception is at the same time a focus on agility, on the capacity to master perception, on the uses of frankness as well as deception, on the usefulness of reticence, but, above all, on the importance of discretion. Discretion, here, is the product of deliberation and interior dialogue; both Machiavelli and Guicciardini have "intellectualist" proclivities. Ricordo 83, which presses meditation on political actors, is of a piece with Machiavelli's letter to Guicciardini, which deplores the lack of opportunity for "thinking" as opposed to both action and talk.²⁵

But I will claim that Guicciardini's Ricordi, as a rich instantiation of proverbial strategy, provide a more tough-minded account of political history and political possibility than Machiavelli's Prince. Machiavelli teaches by example. The Discourses as well as the Prince can be seen as a tissue of narrative paradigms, and the paradigms often isolate Machiavelli on the high ground of policy decisions, forcing him to draw inferences from one complex political situation in order to make sense of another. One of the difficulties of the Prince, then, is the presence of naive injunctions to imitate involuted, even tortuous, policies. It is true that this in effect often subverts imitative response by denying his reader simple models or exemplars. But while his accounts often leave the reader little to imitate, this dialectic of imperative and subversion makes his style difficult, if not repellant. Guicciardini has a more sophisticated notion of imitation, and thus a more suggestive conception of the relation of exemplar to image and of general rule to specific use.²⁶ Guicciardini emphasised the pertinence of receptive frame; his notions of exemplarity and instantiation require of the reader "a good and perspicacious eye" (117), habits of close attention to detail, and a taste for variety and surprise. It would seem that it is in clear contrast to Machiavelli that Guicciardini exclaims: "How wrong it is to cite the Romans at every turn. For any comparison to be valid, it would be necessary to have a city with conditions like theirs, and then to govern it according to their examples" (110).²⁷

It would seem, then, that Guicciardini's "classicism" is peculiar as well. While Machiavelli attempts a thorough integration of classical Roman and vernacular Italian examples, Guicciardini's Ricordi read classical texts as a vernacular wisdom. Thus the Ricordi represent, on the one hand, a manifestation of municipalism, i.e., Florentine patriotism, and, on the other hand, recapitulation of a proverbial strategy used by those hard-pressed Romans, Tacitus and Seneca.²⁸ And certainly there are important differences between "normal" humanist modes of classical appropriation and Guicciardinian tactics of use. The contemporaneous discourse on proverbs of Beroaldo and Polydore Vergil shares the fundamental humanist assumption that there is nothing so humble or ordinary that cannot be rendered splendid by oratorical ornament. And Polydore Vergil's second collection, the Adagiorum Liber, displays the humanist passion for discourse analysis; here he accounts for proverbs as verbal strategies, figures of speech: metaphor, allegory, allusio, hyperbole, scomma.²⁹ Both the ornamental and analytic initiatives attest a basic humanist commitment to "manipulation." A compendious late Renaissance collection by Grynaeus responds to the challenge of accessibility; proverbial wisdom, organised under the topoi, the commonplaces of argument, becomes instantly useful to the reader as writer.³⁰ And in the most manipulative of all strategies, Henri Estienne's work Les Premices not only organises proverbs under commonplaces but engages in an elaborate double discourse; to demonstrate use, "proverb" becomes the active verb "proverbialise"; his aim is to write "proverbs epigrammatizez," or rather, "epigrammes proverbializez."³¹

It would not do, then, to overemphasise a discontinuity between classical or "learned" and popular proverb. Indeed, Stackelberg detects a general trend of "proverbialising" sententiae in the late Renaissance; the aphorism, which began as a learned, specifically medical maxim, is presented increasingly in "unsystematischen, unpedantischen, und kurzgefassten Darstellungsweise."³² Certainly, the late Renaissance collectors treat Guicciardini and Machiavelli as well as Tacitus and Seneca as quintessentially proverbial.³³ The homogeneity of tone of proverbial wisdom is rooted in the homogeneity of premiss of the nature of political behavior. Tacitus, Seneca, and Guicciardini teach the importance of an enduring intimate community, the face-to-face encounters within an imperial or princely context, tyrannical or not. The basic constraint of proverbial omnicompetence constrains a description of response to occasions of the widest possible distribution: that is, to the ordinary give-and-take of individuals forced to use objects and services as signs. Proverbs teach skills for close encounters; since princely encounters are necessarily invested with intimacy, they teach political survival as well. The Ricordi share procedures with Roman imperial satires and letters, histories and essays, while they eschew another classical strategy: that of the formal exercise which relates to political policy and structures to a general logico-ontological system. Seneca and Guicciardini prefer informal investigation, a presentation of a heterogeneous group of insights as explanatory of the variety of experience; the "authority" of the writer derives from a bond with an assumed collective wisdom.^[34]

To be sure, it is somewhat suspicious to attribute an "anthropologising" consciousness to Guicciardini in the light of the current historical fashion of explaining the. behavior of Renaissance Florentine elites, indeed, of all classes by reference to modern anthropological constructs. But my emphasis on the proverbialising moment in the Ricordi is a claim for the wit and perspicacity of Guicciardini's conflation of reading, experience, and counsel.³⁵ The Ricordi must be placed within the general context of the production and reception of counsel in the sixteenth century.³⁶ And again, we should observe the coherence of humanist and Guicciardinian proverbial strategies. First and most importantly, all strong initiatives recognise the imperative of investigating a social paradigm and fabricating a notion of community which takes account of the severe constraints of a "courtly" environment. Thus the humanist Beroaldo insists on personal interdependence as fact: the prudentia of the prince in the matter of wisdom; counsel is a matter of discursive exchange, rather than solipsist construction.³⁷ At the same time, for Beroaldo as well as Guicciardini the task of counseling is complicated by the difficult as well as useful intimacy of the court. A topos of the texts of counsel is the attack on the flattery which infects the relation between prince and courtly subject; Beroaldo thus describes adulation: "… veluti gangrena serpens latissime intra limina potentiorum …" (De Optimo Statu n.p.). And surely, when Guicciardini, citing Tacitus again (BIO), refers to Tiberius' rating of the deplorable Roman patriciate, he focuses on the dangers of the politics of intimacy. When Guicciardini represents the isolation of a prince (141), the latter appears as isolated in a crowd.

This, of course, is the state of affairs which the proverb, as communal wisdom for communal use, addresses. Beroaldo makes a specific connection between "proverbial" and "political"; advice to princes, he claims, is easily couched in proverbial terms (De Optimo Statu ciiiv.v). But where Beroaldo goes on to invoke an abstract understanding of ideal political forms, the claims the Ricordi make, as proverbial, are those on a residual, shared experience of intimate relations. Discretion is as much a condition as a result of reading. Thus Hess describes Guicciardini's advice as requiring intimate response: as "diario di esperienza," it demands a series of immediate and naive reactions from life.³⁸

The appeal of the proverbial mode is a much less simple, direct, and didactic approach than it at first appears. In all evaluations of moral discourse, one must make a distinction between useless moralism and true moral work. Both Machiavelli and Guicciardini efface moralism by new and rigorous varieties of moral work which allow neither the cheerful truism nor smug casuistry to survive as valid stratagem. Like Machiavelli, Guicciardini is thoughtful but not academic. There is no attempt either to teach a programme of canonic moral texts or to place one's own work within a tradition of systematic commentary. The perspicuity of Guicviardini's project, however, lies in a proverbial capacity to repel attempts to stray from intimate experience in the formulation of political insight, a capacity which subverts intellectual as well as political solipsism.

Notes

¹ Felix Gilbert, "The Humanist Concept of the Prince," JMH 11(1939):449-83.

² Quentin Skinner, "'Social Meaning' and the Explanation of Social Action," in Philosophy, Politics, and Society, fourth ser., eds. P. Laslett et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), 144-45. An intriguing Derridian effort is that of Michael McCanles, The Discourse of 'Il Principe," Humana Civilitas 8 (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1983); a neo-Aristotelian reading can be found in E. Garver, "Machiavelli's Prince: A Neglected Rhetorical Classic," Philosophy and Rhetoric 17(1980).

³ "Le cinque redazioni dei Ricordi," in Guicciardini e la crisi del Rinascimento (Bari: Laterza, 1979), 61ff. Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi, ed. R. Spongano, Autori classici e documenti di lingua pubblicati dall'Accademia della Crusca (Firenze: Sansoni, 1951). All Italian citations, unless otherwise noted, will be from the primary, or C version of Spongano; all English translations will be those of M. Domandi, Francesco Guicciardini: Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

⁴ G. Hess, "Guicciardini und die Anfinge der moralistischen Literatur," in Gesellschaft-Literatur-Wissenschaft: Gesammelte Schriften (1938-1966), ed. H. R. Jauss and C. Muller-Daehn (Muchen: 1967), claims that a focus on the successive versions is necessarily a focus on the issue of the Ricordi as "eine eigene, neuartige Form von literarischer Aussage …" (15). "'Inhalt' und 'Ordung' sind demnach wenig wichtig. Worauf es ankommt, lasst sich am ehesten an der Struktur (oder Form) des Aphorismus erkennen" (18).

⁵ Recall that Kenneth Burke begins his project of relating literature to life with the proverb, as strategy for dealing with, naming situations, as originary instance of literary activity as social action; he asks, "Could the most complex and sophisticated work of art legitimately be considered somewhat as 'proverbs writ large'?" "Literature as Equipment for Living," The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1941), 296. "Strategy," of course, is the key construct of Burkean rhetorical analysis. Burke, I think, would claim that for Guicciardini to begin with proverb would indicate Guicciardini was getting down to brass tacks in political speculation; here Guicciardini enjoins "realistic," not simply "self-gratifying" strategies (298).

On proverb or adage in the Renaissance see R. L. Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), esp. ch. 2, "Small Forms: Multo in parvo," 32ff.; Terence C. Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), ch. 1, "Copia" and N. Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975), ch.8, "Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors."

⁶ See M. Fubini's seminal discussion of the stylistic and thematic importance of the Ricordi, "Le quattro redazioni dei Ricordi del Guicciardini: Contributo allo studio della formazione del linguaggio e dello stile guicciardiniano," Studi sulla letteratura del Rinascimento (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1971), 126-77. Fubini cites E. Fueter's dismissal of the Ricordi as neither stylistically nor theoretically as interesting as La Rochefoucauld's Maxims only to confute it (126); further, Fubini emphasises unity in progress: the later redactions develop a more "generic and literary" expression, but do not lose or diminish the insights of earlier redactions of the proverbs (143ff.).

⁷ Fron Margaret M. Phillips, Erasmus on his Times: A Shortened Version of the Adages of Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), 3.

⁸ P. Beroaldus, Proverbiorum Libellus (Venezia: 1498), xxxvi r: "Ad haec habent proverbia quiddam simile legibus; quarum scriptum angustum et interpretatio latissima. Siquidem summa brevitate conclusa: intellectum uberiorem complectuntur."

⁹ Aristotle, Rhetorica, tr. W. Rhys Roberts (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946), 1393b.

¹⁰ G. Neumann, "Einleitung," Der Aphorismus: Zur Geschichte, zu den Formen und Moglichkeiten einer literarischen Gattung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), cites Hess, "Guicciardini und die Anfange der moralistischen Literatur," and comments that in the aphorism the relation is essentially problematical; the aphorism is a "Konfliktform des Erkennens zwischen einzelnem Faktum and generalisierender Aussage. Die 'Ricordi' Francesco Guicciardinis leben aus der Dialektik von caso und regola, von Situation und Leitsatz: Aus ihrem Spannungsfeld entspringt dem Leser die politische Einsicht" (7).

¹¹ Thus P. Beroaldus: "Vulgares sententiae sunt proverbia. Vulgares scriptores sunt Virgilius et Cicero. Quid enim magis in ore vulgi est, quid usu populari magis detritum? Docti indoctique, urbani et rustici, opifices omnes …, ""Oratio proverbiorum," Opuscula quae in Hoc Volumine Continentur … (Venezia: 1508), lvi r. See also the prefatory letter to Polydore Vergil's Proverbiorum Libellus (Venezia: 1498). The attribute "communis" is, of course, medieval as well: G. Vecchi, "II 'proverbio' nella pratica letteraria dei dettatori della scuola di Bologna," Studi mediolatini e volgari 2(1954):283-302 cites two medieval definitions: "Premittendum est generale proverbium, id est communis sententia, cui consuetudo fidem attribuit, opinio communis assensum accommodat. Incorrupta veritatis integritas adquiescit…," from Matthew of Vendôme, Ars Versiflcatoria, in E. Faral, Les Arts poetiques du XII et du XIIIsiecle (Paris: Champion, 1924), 284, and "Proverbium est sermo brevis communi hominum opinione comprabatus …," from Bene di Firenze, Candelabrum 288.

¹² Seneca, De Beneflciis, in Moral Essays III.I.iv:2, tr. J. W. Basore, (Cambridge: 1975); the list of benefits I used is Seneca's, I.ii:4. I do not think it is necessary to make a case that Guicciardini "read" Seneca, although the proverb of 138 is Senecan: Senecan texts permeated Florentine culture. R. Sabbadini claims Seneca's philosophical works as "notissime," Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne' secoli XIV e XV: Nuove ricerche (Firenze: Sansoni, 1914), 250.

¹³ S. Cavell attacks a naive moralism which insists that "the concept 'good' is simply application of a general principle to individual cases" (cf. P. Foot, "Moral Beliefs," in Theories of Ethics, ed. P. Foot [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967], 85). Cavell eschews the search for moral "rules": "No rule or principle could function in a moral context the way regulatory or defining rules function in games. It is as essential to the form of life called morality that rules so conceived be absent as it is essential to the form of life we call playing a game that they be present …," The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 307; cited in Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minneapolis Press, 1982), 185.

¹⁴ The notion of the proverb as eschewing cognitive optimism and thus moral simplicity is medieval as well; see Vecchi, "II 'proverbio,'" (286), where he cites Boncompagni di Firenze's definition: "Proverbium est brevis verborum series obscuram in se continens sententiam," Palma, in C. Sutter, Aus Leben und Schriften des Magisters Boncompagno (Freiburg: Mohr/Siebeck, 1894), 103.

¹⁵ Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, tr. R. Gummere (Cambridge: 1970), LXXXI.24: "At contra sapientia exornat omne beneficium ac sibi ipsa commendat et se adsidua eius commemoratione delectat. Malis una voluptas est et haec brevis, dum accipiunt beneficia, ex quibus sapienti longum gaudium manet ac perenne."

¹⁶ Seneca, De Beneficiis I.x:3; see Ricordi 41, 134, 135, 201.

¹⁷ Seneca, De Beneficiis I.vi:l; Ep. LXXXI.21; see Ricordi 11, B43.

¹⁸ "Insegna molto bene Comelio Tacito a chi vive sotto a' tiranni el modo di vivere e govemarsi prudentemente, cosi come insegna a' tiranni e modi di fondare la tirannide."

¹⁹ See, for example, Ricordi 1, 71, 93, 175, 191, 193, 195, 196, 198.

²⁰ See Ricordi 2, 4, 53, 77, 88, 90, 94, 128, 130, 131, 153, 154. See N. Rubinstein's account of "Civic Humanism" in "Le dottrine politiche nel Rinascimento," in nl Rinascimento: Interpretazioni e problemi, eds. M. Boas-Hall et al. (Bari: Laterza, 1979), 183-237. Note that Rubinstein comments on Guicciardini's distrust of "liberty."

²¹ "… spesso tra 'I palazzo e la piazza e una nebbia si folta o uno muro si grosso che, non vi penetrando l'occhio degli uomini.…"

²² See Ricordi 38, 53, 88, 90, 94, 98-101, 103, 132, 170, 174, 184, 186, 195, 200.

²³ A close reading of both the De Beneficiis and the Ep. LXXXI will reveal many parallels with the Guicciardinian account of benefit exchange. It is intriguing that K.-D. Nothdurft, in Studien zum Einfluss Senecas auf die Philosophie und Theologie des zwolften Jahrhunderts, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1963), has pointed out that the early "Mirrors for Princes" and their sources, e.g., William of Conches' Moralium Dogma Philosophorum, also employed the central passages from the De Beneficiis to describe the princely situation. One could say Guicciardini transforms the Furstenspiegel by employing fresh Seneca to refurbish old Seneca; see Nothdurft, esp. 101ff.

²⁴The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975).

²⁵ Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1961), 451.

²⁶ I have discussed another revision of Machiavelli an exemplarity in "Pasquier's Recherches de la France: The Exemplarity of His Medieval Sources" (paper read at the Medieval Academy, April, 1983). Felix Gilbert notes the lack of exempla in the History of Italy, in Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), 282.

²⁷ "Quanto si ingannono coloro che a ogni parola allegano e Romani!—Bisognerebbe avere una citta condizionata come era loro, e poi govemarsi secondo quello essemplo: el quale a chi ha le qualita disproporzionate e tanto disproporzionato, quanto sarebbe volere che un asino facessi el corso di uno cavallo."

²⁸ The connection of Senecan wisdom and proverbial form is medieval; typical of the medieval florilegia which employ the strategy of distilling Senecan texts into lists of aphorisms is Les Proverbes Seneke, a late thirteenth-century text, embedded in a chronicle; see E. Ruhe, Les Proverbes Seneke le philosophe: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte des Speculum historiale von Vinzenz von Beauvais und der Chronique dite de Baudouin d'Avesnes, Beitrdge zur romanischen Philologie des Mettelalters 5 (Miunchen: Hueber, 1969).

²⁹Polydori Vergilii Urbinatis Adagiorum Liber (Basilea: 1521), 3.

³⁰ J. J. Grynaeus, Adagia, id est: Proverbiorum, proemiarum et parabolarum omnium … (1629).

³¹ H. Estienne, Les Premices, ou le I livre des proverbes epigrammatizez, ou, des epigrammes proverbializez … (1584).

³² J. von Stackelberg, "Zur Bedeutungsgeschichte des Wortes 'Aphorismus,'" in Der Aphorismos 210n.

³³ Stackelberg cites G. Canini d'Anghiari, who translated B. Alamos de Barrientos' Tacito Espailol (Madrid: 1614), and who also produced Aforismi politici, cavati dall' historia d'Italia di M F. Guicciardini (Venezia: 1625), in "Bedeutungsgeschichte" (214).

³⁴ See the review essay of E. Brucker, "Tales of Two Cities," AHR 88(1983):599-618.

³⁵ This is in opposition to M. Gagneux's rather reductive Marxist reading of Guicciardini as simply spokesman for his class; see "Ideologie et opportunisme chez Francois Guichardin, in Ecrivains et lepouvoir en Italie i V'epoque de la Renaissance, Centre de recherche sur la Renaissance italienne, eds. A. Rochon et al. (Paris: Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1973), 155-242. Dale Kent's work in the fifteenth-century letters of the Medici archive, for example, would seem to reveal similar "anthropological" investment in the reciprocal bonds of gratitude and benefit between patron and client, with similar constraints and moral rationalisations, and thus would substantiate Guicciardini's account as perspicacious ("The Dynamic of Power in Cosimo de' Medici's Florence," unpublished paper).

³⁶ On the history of the career and role of the intellectual as counselor in Renaissance Italy see F. Gaeta, "Dal comune alla corte rinascimentale," and A. A. Rosa, "La Chiesa e gli stati regionali nell'eta dell'assolutismo", Letterratura italiana: I. n letterato e le istituzioni, ed. A. A. Rosa (Torino: Einaudi, 1982); on Guicciardini see esp. Rosa, 267-69.

³⁷ P. Beroaldus, Libellus de Optimo Statu & Principe, in Opusculum Eruditum … (Bologna: 1497), n. p. "Sit igitur princeps non solum ipse preditus prudentia verum etiam consiliarios prudentes habeat: quibus bene consulentibus credere possit. Nemo enim per se unquam solus ita sapit: Nemo ita circumspectus ac sagax: Nemo ita lineus est ut non aliquando labet atque cecutiat." This notion of the counseling situation recalls N. Elias' construct of "figuration" as "a structure of mutually oriented and dependent people.… they exist … only as pluralities, figurations," The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, tr. E. Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 261.

³⁸ G. Hess, "G. und die Anfange der moralistischen Literatur" (27); "Bei der zeitlichen Ndhe zu Montaigne—und der Ndhe romantischer 'Tagebuicher'—lag es wohl nahe, den Bekenntnischarakter der Ricordi zu betonen und sie als 'diario di esperienza,' als 'storia e confessione' des Ich zu deuten" (17). To be sure, Colie felt that intimate exchange was an attribute of all Renaissance "mini-genres," but her originary example was Erasmus' Adagia, a text which continually requires the reader to make connections and supply contexts and functions (Resources of Kind 35ff.). And perhaps we can reconcile the "privacy" of the Ricordi, demonstrated in the thinness of its publication history, with its intrusive, interventionist nature if we see privacy as related to demanding intimacy. Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), ch. 1, claims that "Guicciardini's ultrapragmatic family Ricordi, unpublished during the Renaissance, have the status of a concealed weapon.…" Whigham also regards as central Burke's definition of literary strategy as proverbial strategy.