SOURCE: "Francesco Guicciardini in Modern Critical Literature," Annali d'Italianistica, Vol. 2, 1984, pp. 7-18.

[In the following essay, Bondanella traces the publication history of Guicciardini's writings, noting that while some of his editors have been interested in the moral content of his work, others have concentrated on his style and method.]

Guicciardini's place in Italian and European literary history owes as much to extraliterary factors as it does to a reasoned assessment of the merits of his works. Given the peculiar publication history of his works, a comprehensive view of Guicciardini's contributions to Italian Renaissance culture was perhaps not even possible until only very recently. It is too often forgotten that Guicciardini's critical reputation was originally based upon a small portion of his total work—only the Storia d'Italia was ever published in its entirety during the Renaissance. The editio princeps appeared in Florence in 1561, followed in rapid succession by translations in Latin and all the major European languages. Thus, Guicciardini's reputation rested solely upon his magisterial history of Italy from the time of its publication until the mid-nineteenth century, and critics or scholars remained unaware that other works of great interest were yet to be discovered in the Guicciardini family archives and to be edited for publication. These would include all of Guicciardini's voluminous correspondence, his Ricordi, his Considerazioni sui "Discorsi" del Machiavelli, his several discourses on Florentine government, and two historical works—Le cose florentine and Storie florentine. In short, before the nineteenth century, Guicciardini's stature as a major writer was impossible to analyze accurately.

The publication of the ten volume edition of Guiceiardini's almost complete works by Giuseppe Canestrini between 1857 and 1867 set the stage for an immediate and radical reevaluation of Guicciardini's importance to Renaissance culture, although the implications of these archival discoveries have become clearly evident only during the last decade. I say almost complete because an early historical work, Le cose florentine, had yet to be discovered by the dean of Guicciardini scholars, Roberto Ridolfi, and would remain unknown until the mid-twentieth century. Canestrini's edition appeared at a fateful moment, during the height of the Risorgimento and its struggle to unify a modern Italy. Guicciardini's hitherto unpublished works represented a gold mine of information about Italy's most glorious historical epoch, and it was only natural that Italians of the last century would wish to reexamine their traditions in the light of their recent struggle for national independence and unification. Particular attention was paid to the Renaissance during this period of national soul-searching, for educated Italians needed an answer to a vexing question: How had Italy fallen from the cultural, political, and economic hegemony over Europe in the Renaissance to a position of servility and dependence? What flaw of national character made this tragedy possible? The answer to this complex question was to influence Guicciardini's critical reputation for almost a century.

In response to Canestrini's discoveries, two early interpretations appeared in France and in Italy which would continue to dominate the critical literature for some years to come: a French book by Eugene Benoist,¹ and a critical essay entitled "L'uomo del Guicciardini" by Francesco De Sanctis (1865), the thesis of which was later incorporated into the immensely influential Storia della letteratura italiana (1870-71).² While Benoist's study is one of the first to examine all of Guicciardini's writings, it nevertheless pronounces a negative judgment on them. In fact, he agrees with Montaigne's earlier pronouncement that Guicciardini must have had some serious personal flaw to see only self-interest in the mechanisms of human history. It was De Sanctis' judgment which was to carry more weight.

De Sanctis admits that the Storia d'Italia must be considered one of the most important works ever written by an Italian in terms of its intellectual power; he nevertheless bases much of his influential opinion of Guicciardini upon a reading of the Ricordi. And in raising this collection of philosophical maxims to a position ranking alongside Guicciardini's major historical work, De Sanctis signals the path for several generations of critics. However, De Sanctis views Guicciardini from the perspective of the Risorgimento. In his opinion, the Italians of the High Renaissance (and he considered Guicciardini a perfect representative of his times and his class) abandoned spiritual values, the love for liberty or freedom, and the desire to sacrifice themselves for a noble cause; in the place of these high ideals was self-interest, Guicciardini's particulare. Guicciardini, like Machiavelli, wanted to see Italy freed from the clutches of the priests and foreigners, but unlike Machiavelli he was incapable of following his ideals when they clashed with his self-interest. If Machiavelli's exhortation at the conclusion of Il principe to free Italy from the barbarians was taken (erroneously) to signify a precursor to the Risorgimento's unification of Italy under a Savoy dynasty, Guicciardini's attitude did not suit a generation tested by prison, exile, and war to achieve political independence. De Sanctis viewed Guicciardini's perspective not only as a personal defect in his character but as a flaw in the national character as well: fools such as Machiavelli were too few, while the "wise" men such as Guicciardini were too many; and while individuals such as Guicciardini may prosper, a nation of such people can only meet with disaster.

While De Sanctis established a point of view on Guicciardini's works which employed the writer's motives and biographical information to call into question the morality of his ideas, other scholars abroad were more interested in Guicciardini's place in the development of historiography. In particular, the German scholars Leopold von Ranke³ and, later, Eduard Fueter⁴ attempted, with remarkable success, to place Guicciardini in a broader framework which analyzed his achievements somewhat more dispassionately than had De Sanctis. In their writings we witness the first phase of interest in Guicciardini's contributions to Renaissance historiography, a scholarly topic which has been revived in recent years.

In the first half of the twentieth century Guicciardini scholarship was characterized by several developments: an increasingly complex perspective on the composition of the two major works, the Ricordi and the Storia d'Italia; a major reconsideration of Guicciardini's critical fortune in European culture; the publication of important critical editions of Guicciardini's writings; and the appearance of a number of general works which aimed at a synthesis of the writer's life and works. In 1926, for example, Andréi Otetea published a French monograph on Guicciardini's life and writings which, although now rendered somewhat unreliable due to recent archival discoveries, was for its time a rather valuable study.⁵ Other equally general interpretations, although less reliable and less useful today, include works by Luigi Malagodi⁶—a somewhat shallow biographical treatment of Guicciardini, now rendered obsolete—Vito Vitale,⁷ and Ugo Spirito,⁸ who produced an interesting comparison of Guicciardini with Machiavelli, continuing this always fascinating argument which had entered the critical literature with De Sanctis.

None of these studies, however, made as original a contribution to the critical literature as that of an American, Vincenzo Luciani, whose Francesco Guicciardini and his European Reputation presented a monumental overview of Guicciardini's reception within Italy and abroad—a work which remains even today the single indispensable treatment of the topic.⁹ Luciani's book finally received an Italian translation over a decade after its initial appearance in English, and it has been a standard work for any scholar interested in Guicciardini since that day. A model for scrupulous scholarship, comprehensive treatment, and careful erudition, this study constitutes one of the best examples of a type of research, a writer's reception abroad, which is no longer so popular today.

Luciani's analysis of the complexities behind the growth of Guicciardini's European reputation made a greater original contribution to our knowledge about the Florentine writer than did the various general works on his life and writings; however, philological discoveries and theories about the composition of Guicciardini's two major works made perhaps the most lasting impression upon this century's scholarship. In the case of Guicciardini's Storia d'Italia, Roberto Ridolfi's important treatment of the work's genesis and composition would lay the groundwork for any future treatment of the evolution of Guicciardini's historiography.¹⁰ According to Ridolfi's thesis, the work was begun around 1534 (and not in 1528-29 as Benedetto Varchi claimed) as a less comprehensive narrative of historical events ocurring between 1525-26. Three manuscripts of this "false start" exist, and the material was later incorporated into Book XVI of the historical work that was eventually published. Then Guicciardini began dictating to his secretary a different history, which returned to 1490 as a starting point and of which several versions exist in manuscript with autograph corrections. Finally, the last copy (presently in the Biblioteca Laurenziana) was dictated in 1539 after the author suffered a serious attack of apoplexy. Although the last four books were completed without receiving a final revision, the entire work stands as a completed and unfragmentary whole and was, unlike all Guicciardini's other works, very definitely intended for publication. His death in 1540 hindered these plans, but the papers were saved by the family until the eventual publication in 1561 of the first printed edition of the history which made its author famous.

The problems surrounding the composition of the Ricordi are even more complex and their suggested solutions even more uncertain and debatable. Unlike the history of Italy, this work was never completed for publication during Guicciardini's lifetime (indeed, we are uncertain whether he ever intended it to see the light of day). Moreover, his maxims were collected in a bewildering series of manuscripts, one of which was apparently given away in 1561 by a relative, causing some of the maxims to appear in print during the sixteenth century. It is largely due to the work of Michele Barbi¹¹ and Mario Fubini,¹² later followed closely by the magnificent editorial work of Raffaele Spongano,¹³ that we have come to understand the history of the composition of the Ricordi. Two notebooks in Guicciardini's hand (known as Q1 and Q2) contain some 29 maxims. A more comprehensive autograph manuscript, manuscript B, retains the Q2 maxims in their original order with a total of 181 ricordi. The final version, C, contains 221 maxims and dates from 1530; 91 maxims in it are completely original and are not contained in B. The result of the scholarly efforts by Barbi, Fubini, and Spongano was to prove that another manuscript (A) once existed, which is no longer extant but was probably a version of the one given away by a family member in 1561.

The controversy over Guicciardini's methods of composition had important consequences for the preparation of critical editions of his various writings (most of the autograph manuscripts of which, with a few notable exceptions, are conserved in the family archives in Florence). By the end of the war in 1945, a number of major critical editions had been prepared under the direction of Roberto Palmarocchi, whose scholarly work was particularly important for Guicciardini's minor dialogues or treatises and his autobiographical writings.¹⁴ In addition, there appeared an important edition of the Storia d'Italia edited by Costantino Panigada.¹⁵ Even more useful an undertaking was the beginning of a complete edition of Guicciardini's voluminous correspondence, edited by Roberto Palmarocchi and Pier Giorgio Ricci, which began to appear in 1938 and is still in the process of reaching completion.¹⁶ But the greatest surprise was Roberto Ridolfi's discovery of a hitherto unknown work, an incomplete history of Florence which Ridolfi entitled Le cose florentine. ¹⁷

This discovery changed entirely the way scholars looked at Guicciardini's intellectual development. This work, begun around 1527, almost two decades after the composition of his earlier Storie florentine, was left unfinished when Guicciardini turned to work on his masterpiece, the Storia d'Italia. As far as we can tell, the narrative was to have begun around the Ciompi revolt and to have continued until around 1494. While the first Florentine history owes a great debt to the medieval chronicles of the city, this second effort reveals that Guicciardini was profoundly influenced by humanist views of historiography. In particular, Ridolfi's research and the resulting critical edition demonstrated the extent to which Guicciardini employed new and more modern historical methodology than any of his contemporaries, Machiavelli included. Rather than continuing a single narrative source, Guicciardini sifted patiently through both primary and secondary sources, having archival materials at his disposal. In brief, his writing was far closer to the kind of work we now call historical research than that of any other man before his lifetime.

Guicciardini studies since 1945 have been characterized by a number of new critical perspectives, which slowly shifted from a predominantly Italian perspective to a wider, European or even trans-Atlantic one. For the purposes of this survey article, we may distinguish several specific areas in which the greatest contributions have been made during this period: work on Guicciardini's biography and his immediate family; the analysis of Guicciardini's minor works and their place in the genesis of the greater history and his maxims; Guicciardini's place in the tradition of humanist historiography; Guicciardini's style; and finally (and not the least in importance), translations of Guicciardini's various works.

Through the efforts of several tireless workers engaged in the Guicciardini family archives (especially Roberto Ridolfi), we now know far more about Guicciardini's life and his immediate family circle than ever before. Ridolfi's Vita di Francesco Guicciardini, which first appeared in 1960, was translated into English in 1968 and has recently been revised and reissued in Italian. Ridolfi's work established a masterful critical biography which remains the single most important research tool for any serious scholar.¹⁸ Ridolfi's life of Guicciardini may be less compelling than his companion volume on Machiavelli, but it is a gold mine of information, ideas, and perspectives no scholar can afford to ignore. The late Conte Paolo Guicciardini, a worthy descendant of the Florentine historian, was most active in organizing the family archives (where most of Guicciardini's papers and manuscripts are still conserved), making them available to scholars, and publishing a number of quite useful works on his ancestor which were based upon the extensive holdings of Guicciardini translations and editions in the Guicciardini family library. In particular, his two volumes on English and French translations of the Storia d I'talia remain of value. Perhaps even more intriguing is a discussion of the history of the Guicciardini family palazzo (on Via Guicciardini next to the Palazzo Pitti), with a minutely detailed account of its many alterations and a description of its library and archives.¹⁹

Archival studies of the family documents have revealed a good deal of interesting historical information, since the Guicciardini family archives are among the most completely preserved in Florence. In 1953, Nicolai Rubinstein published an important article which established clear links between the traditional family diaries composed by the patrician families of Florence (including Francesco's family) and Guicciardini's first attempts at the composition of history in the Storie florentine.²⁰ Even more interesting data arose from a major analysis of private wealth in Renaissance Florence by Richard A. Goldthwaite.²¹ This comparative study of four major patrician families provides a very detailed description of how the various members of the Guicciardini family made their fortunes, how their riches were invested, and how their wealth fluctuated over the course of time. A briefer but excellent article several years later by Randolph Stamn furnishes a useful supplement to Goldthwaite's groundbreaking work by focusing upon the economic relationships between Francesco and his brothers.²²

While attention was being focused upon Guicciardini's biography and family background with fresh discoveries from the archives, two Italian works and one German study offered rich hypotheses concerning the development of Guicciardini's thought and new documentation on the political and cultural context of his works. In an important book, Vittorio De Caprariis moved away from the traditional emphasis upon the Ricordi and examined the slow progression in Guicciardini's life from minor political dialogues and treatises or urban histories to the Storia d'Italia.²³ De Caprariis was perhaps the first scholar to direct our attention to the fact that Guicciardini was a serious political thinker with concrete proposals for constitutional changes in Florence and that his subsequent fame as a historian was more the result of a "conversion" from politics to history brought about by the course of events rather than by choice. In much the same vein, Raffaello Ramat published another masterful overview of Guicciardini's works, emphasizing their political content and Guicciardini's efforts to reconstruct the Florentine constitution.²⁴ For Ramat, however, the Ricordi remain a crucial moment in the intellectual formation of the historian. In fact, the Storia d'Italia represents an enlargement of the negative vision of the maxims, a grandiose work which gives historical credibility to the cynical principles collected in the writer's private notebooks never intended for publication. For Ramat, the structure of the Storia d'Italia consciously presents the fate of Renaissance Italy in a tragic light, and it is this stoic perspective upon human history which constitutes Guicciardini's originality.

Without any doubt, however, the most important book from the decade immediately following the war must be considered Rudolf von Albertini's Das florentinische Staatsbewusstsein im Ubergang von der Republik zum Prinzipat (1955), which received an Italian translation only in 1970 and remains still unavailable in English.²⁵ With a masterful sense of perspective, von Albertini traced the evolution of the city of Florence from the rule of Lorenzo de' Medici and Savonarola through the republic of Machiavelli and Soderini to the establishment of a Medici dynasty. In the process, von Albertini provided the most exhaustive analysis to date (including an appendix of documents of approximately 200 pages) of the constitutional debates and political issues which motivated all historians or political theorists of the period, Guicciardini included. As a result of von Albertini's study, much of which had traditionally passed for original thinking in the works of a Machiavelli or a Guicciardini, for example, was now seen as part of a larger constitutional debate in which other voices had interesting, if not so celebrated, points of view. Furthermore, von Albertini's comprehensive survey of the interrelationship between the historical events and the many treatises, histories, discourses, and dialogues the period produced enabled the scholar to distinguish true originality from mere reflections on preexisting traditions in political philosophy. Without his work, the studies of Felix Gilbert or J. G. A. Pocock—to mention only a few scholars who followed in his footsteps—would have been impossible.

Following von Albertini's lead, a number of important studies by F. Gilbert, Emanuella Lugnani Scarano, and J. G. A. Pocock focused upon Guicciardini's relationship to the political crises of his times and their influences on his various historical or political writings. Gilbert's Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence may, in some respects, be said to represent a worthy successor to De Sanctis' earlier juxtaposition of these two great Florentine writers.²⁶ Gilbert viewed the period which produced both writers as one of recurrent political crises, to which each theorist responded in profoundly different ways. Gilbert's interpretation of Guicciardini thus results from a wider vision of sixteenth-century Florentine and European politics. Primarily interested in Guicciardini's progress from his early works to his mature historical masterpiece, the Storia d'Italia, Gilbert believes that Guicciardini was the first important historian to reject using history to demonstrate general rules of conduct. Since history did not reveal a pattern for him, the historian could turn his attention to factual correctness and, more importantly, to constant change. As a result, history began to take on its own, independent meaning. Thus Guicciardini serves as both the last great expression of classical historiography and the first great work of modern historiography.

Interested as he was in Guicciardini's role as historiographer, Gilbert paid little attention to the minor political treatises, dialogues, and maxims. These too-often neglected "minor" works, as well as the Ricordi, were treated in much greater detail, following von Albertini's lead, by E. Lugnani Scarano in several important articles,²⁷ in a major new critical edition of Guicciardini's writings,²⁸ and in a volume she contributed to the prestigious critical history of Italian literature published by Laterza.²⁹ The article on the Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze, by far the most penetrating and lengthy study devoted to one of Guicciardini's minor works, discovers in it great originality, in particular a striking depersonalization of political theory with a parallel heightened attention to the role of social institutions. While the dialogue fails to predict the rise of a hereditary principality in Florence under the Medici, it nevertheless employs historical data in an attempt to fashion political institutions to suit changing times, and in this sense it is one of the most original works of the period. In Scarano's second and equally lengthy examination of the various stages of the maxims and their relationship to Guicciardini's other works, her findings trace accurately the various stylistic and philosophical shifts in Guicciardini's writing and thinking, all of which are mirrored in the different versions of the Ricordi. In particular, Scarano sees a progression in the revision of the maxims towards a maximum of autonomy for the individual maxim and an increasing abstraction of thought (as opposed to practical advice or historical hypotheses). Thus, following Gilbert's view of the Storia d'Italia as a work of contemplation rather than of action, Scarano concludes that the Ricordi follow the same pattern: they reflect Guicciardini's state of mind as he moved from concrete, practical political treatises suggesting institutional reforms to a more pessimistic and philosophical view of history as an end in itself, since history revealed no didactic patterns of any significant use to the contemporary politician. For Scarano, then, Guicciardini becomes one of the most modern of all Renaissance writers in his renunciation of action and his philosophical pessimism. In addition to these excellent scholarly essays, Scarano provided the texts of the minor works along with the more famous maxims and the history of Italy in an easily accessible edition. Her volume in the Laterza history of Italian literature devoted to Guicciardini and the other political thinkers of the period managed to expand the role normally devoted to Guicciardini in literary histories.

If Gilbert and Scarano aimed to set Guicciardini and his works within broader Italian political and historical contexts, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition by J. G. A. Pocock represents one of the most ambitious attempts at synthesis in the last several decades of Renaissance scholarship.³⁰ By "Machiavellian moment," Pocock means not only the historical period in which Machiavellian theories appeared but also, in a broader sense, the epoch when early modern Europeans saw the republic, and the citizen's role in it, as a major problem in historical understanding. This "problem" arose in a specific moment in time during which the republic confronted its temporal finitude, while attempting to remain stable in a context of constantly changing historical events. What is most remarkable about Pocock's book is that he convincingly demonstrates that Florentine republican thinkers, such as Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti, began a chain of ideas which would influence republican theories not only in England (James Harrington) but also in colonial America (Jefferson, Adams). Moreover, the Machiavellian tradition (of which Guicciardini was an important element) was always a major republican aspect in English or American political theory, even though it has been consistently overlooked in favor of the social contract theories established by Hobbes and Locke. Pocock sees Guicciardini's early Discorso di Logrogno and the later Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze as crucial documents in the history of the intellectual tradition, particularly in regard to the formation of new definitions of political liberty and the author's discussions of how the various social classes may be represented in different institutions of the state.

So much important material unearthed in the archives and so many novel intellectual perspectives are at the basis of several recent studies which attempt to draw together these various materials within a single work. Two such attempts at a general synthesis include my own Francesco Guicciardini³¹ and Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian's Craft by Mark Phillips.³² My brief monograph on Guicciardini seeks to provide a synthesis of what was known about Guicciardini to the date of publication and to offer a guide to all his works.

In particular, my contention is that Guicciardini's literary style has been long overlooked (although generally admired), and thus the monograph tries to turn the discusion towards such topics as the structure of the maxims, the portrait sketch in the historical writings, and the like. M. Phillips provides an even closer reading of the major and minor texts by Guicciardini. His work begins with the assumption that histories are a literary genre and that historical writing is essentially narrative rather than informative or rhetorical. Taken together, then, these two studies afford the reader a compendium of biographical or historical data now regarded as accurate by most Guicciardini scholars along with a perspective on Guicciardini's qualities as a stylist that political historians often overlook. Both books reflect an even more general tendency in the literature on political writings of the period, especially Machiavelli's, that has recently focused a great deal of attention upon the various rhetorical strategies, terminologies, and narrative techniques of writers usually considered only for their political theories. This perspective has yielded some impressive results, such as the very suggestive recent article by Joseph Markulin on the form of Guicciardini's maxims and the very notion of a book,³³ or several of the essays contributed to this special Guicciardini issue.³⁴ Finally, mention must be made of a major survey by Erich Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance,³⁵ as ambitious in its attention to detail and to the countless variety of Renaissance histories as Pocock's work was in its chronological sweep. Cochrane returns, in a sense, to the historical tradition established by the German scholars of historiography in the nineteenth century (Fueter, in particular). His comprehensive analysis of the various forms of history written in the Italian Renaissance now makes it possible to set Guicciardini against a clearer picture of his intellectual context, his peers, and the methodologies of historiography current in his day.

One could not accurately assess Guicciardini's critical reputation today without paying some attention to the various translations which have recently appeared. Outside of Italy, there is little question that Guicciardini's reputation (even among historians who normally know Italian well) has improved as adequate texts in English translation have become available. Unlike so many of the thoroughly unreliable translations of Machiavelli's works (some still reprinted from nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century editions), Guicciardini's fate among his translators has been remarkably fortunate. All of the translators of Guicciardini have been well versed in the language of the period as well as in its history. As a result, most of the existing translations of Guicciardini are excellent. Cecil Grayson's anthology of the Storia d'Italia and of the Storie forentine (regrettably now out of print) offers selections from these two major historical works.³⁶ An even more remarkable collection of Guicciardini's works, edited by Cecil Grayson and translated by Margaret Grayson, Selected Writings, included not only the Ricordi but also the much rarer Ricordanze and the Considerazion sui 'Discorsi' del Machiavelli,³⁷ all in their entirety. It, too, is now out of print. The late Mario Domandi produced two superb translations—one of the maxims (which included not only the final C version but also the other earlier versions as well),³⁸ and another of the complete Storie florentine.³⁹ Both volumes contained impeccable annotations and critical introductions (the edition of the maxims is still available in an inexpensive paper edition). Finally, mention must be made of Sidney Alexander's excellent partial translation of the Storia d'Italia. Profusely illustrated and handsomely printed, it was recently reissued by the Princeton University Press.⁴⁰ Thus, American students and scholars have access to excellent translations of the maxims and the most important sections of the Storia d'Italia in paperback editions that are reliable as well as readable.

While important archival discoveries may still surprise us in the future, there is little question that the major outlines of Guicciardini's career and works are now clear. Perhaps Guicciardini's writings will never arouse the passionate controversy that has always attended the study of Machiavelli, but the debate over the significance of Guicciardini's historical methodology, his political ideology, and his narrative style remains far from terminated today.⁴¹ It is in this regard that the special issue of Annali d'Italianistica devoted to Guicciardini represents an important and very timely reassessment of Francesco Guicciardini's significance for Italian Renaissance culture.

Notes

¹Guichardin: Historien et homme d 'etat italien au XVIe siecle (Marseille: Librairie Generale, 1862).

² See Francesco De Sanctis, Saggi critici (Bari: Laterza, 1963), 3:1-25; or his Storia della letteratura italiana (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1970), 493-550; for an excellent reconsideration of De Sanctis' judgment of Guicciardini by the foremost Guicciardini scholar of this century, see Roberto Ridolfi, "L'uomo Guicciardini cento anni dopo 'L'uomo del Guicciardini,'" Studi guicciardiniani (Firenze: Olschki, 1978), 225-43.

³ Leopold von Ranke, Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber (Leipzig: Reimer, 1824).

⁴ Eduard Fueter, "Guicciardini als Historiker," Historische Zeitschrift 78 (1897); and Geschichte der neueren Historiog'raphie (Munchen: Oldenbourg, 1911; Italian trans. Napoli, 1943-44).

⁵Francois Guichardin: Sa vie publique et sa pensée politique (Paris: Picart, 1926).

⁶Guicciardini (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1939).

⁷Francesco Guicciardini (Torino: UTET, 1941).

⁸Machiavelli e Guicciardini (Firenze: Sansoni, 1945).

⁹ (New York: K. Otto, 1936); Italian trans., Francesco Guicciardini e la fortuna dell'opera sua (Firenze: Olschki, 1949).

¹⁰ "La genesi della Storia d'Italia," La bibliofilia 40-(1938); revised as La genesi della 'Storia d'Italia' (Firenze: Olschki, 1939), and reprinted in Opuscoli di storia, letteratura e di erudizione (Firenze: Bibliopolis, 1942), 175-201. The definitive and revised version of this key essay can now be found in Ridolfi's Studi guicciardiniani 79-130, together with Ridolfi's collected essays on Guicciardini.

¹¹ "Per una compiuta edizione dei Ricordi politici e civili del Guicciardini," Studi di filologia italiana 3-(1932):163-96.

¹² "Le quattro redazioni dei Ricordi del Guicciardini (contributo allo studio della formazione del linguaggio e dello stile guicciardiniano)," Civiltii moderna 13-(1941):105-24, 247-71.

¹³Ricordi, ed. critica (Firenze: Sansoni, 1951).

¹⁴Dialogo e discorsi del reggimento di Firenze (Bari: Laterza, 1932); Ricordi (Bari: Laterza, 1933); Scritti autobiografici e rari (Bari: Laterza, 1936); Scritti politici e ricordi (Bari: Laterza, 1933); Storie fiorentine (Bari: Laterza, 1931).

¹⁵Storia d'Italia, 5 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1929).

¹⁶Carteggi di Francesco Guicciardini, eds. Roberto Palmarocchi and Pier Giorgio Ricci (Napoli: Istituto Storico Italiano, 1938-), 17 vols. to date. The remaining volumes of this vast undertaking will be edited by Pierre Jodogne, and details may be found in his essay "La ripresa dei lavori intorno ai carteggi di Francesco Guicciardini," La bibliofilia 83(1981): 161-64.

¹⁷Le cose florentine ora per la prima volta pubblicate (Firenze: Olschki, 1945).

¹⁸Vita di Francesco Guicciardini (Roma: Belardetti, 1960; rev. ed. rpt. Milano: Rusconi, 1982; Eng. trans. New York: Knopf, 1968).

¹⁹ Paolo Guicciardini, Le traduzioni inglesi della storia guicciardiniana (Firenze: Olschki, 1951); Le traduzioni ftancesi della storia guicciardiniana (Firenze: Olschki, 1950); and P. Guicciardini and Emilio Doni, Le antiche case ed il palazzo dei Guicciardini in Firenze (Firenze: Olschki, 1952).

²⁰ "The Storie fiorentine and the Memorie difamiglia by Francesco Guicciardini," Rinascimento 4(1953):171-225.

²¹Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A Study of Four Families (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968).

²² "Francesco Guicciardini and His Brothers," in Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi, eds., Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1971), 409-44.

²³Francesco Guicciardini: Dalla politica alla storia (Bari: Laterza, 1950).

²⁴ II Guicciardini e la tragedia d'Italia (Firenze: Olschki, 1953).

²⁵ (Bern: Francke AG Verlag, 1955; Ital. trans. Torino: Einaudi, 1970.)

²⁶ (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965; rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1983.)

²⁷ "II dialogo Del reggimento di Firenze di Francesco Guicciardini," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 145(1968):232-92, 523-60; and "Le redazioni dei Ricordi e la storia del pensiero guicciardiniano dal 1512 al 1530," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 14(1970):181-259.

²⁸Opere di Francesco Guicciardini, 3 vols. (Torino: UTET, 1970-81).

²⁹Guicciardini e la crisi del Rinascimento, Letteratura italiana Laterza, 23 (Bari: Laterza, 1979).

³⁰ (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975.)

³¹ (Boston: Twayne, 1976.)

³² (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1977.)

³³ "Guicciardini's Ricordi and the Idea of a Book," Italica 59(1982):296-305.

³⁴ See especially the articles dealing with Guicciardini's style by P. M. Forni, F. Chiappelli, and also N. S. Struever.

³⁵ (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981.)

³⁶The History of Italy and History of Florence (New York: Washington Square, 1964).

³⁷ (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965.)

³⁸Maxims and Reflections (Ricordi) (New York: Harper & Row, 1965; rpt. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1972).

³⁹The History of Florence (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

⁴⁰The History of Italy (New York: Macmillan, 1969; rpt. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984).

⁴¹ For a rather different assessment of Guicciardini criticism in the last century, see the recent review article by Marco Santoro, "Guicciardini nel quinto centenario della nascita: Problemi e prospettive," Forum Italicum 17(1983):278-87.