Reading for Echoes: The English Guicciardini and the Rhetoric of Exemplarity in the Age of the Armada

Abstract:This essay is a study of one of the earliest and most systematic applications in England of the historical writings of Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini to a specific political problem, the threat of Spanish invasion in the months prior to the Armada of 1588. Its subject is an Elizabethan treatise on foreign policy, existing in fragments and incomplete copies, that can be reconstructed only through uncovering its concealed revisions of Florentine writing. Textual restoration reveals the treatise to be engaged in a sustained negotiation between Machiavellian exemplarity and Guicciardinian historicism, reflected in its tactical adaptations of Florentine aphorisms and examples. History is diminished as a source of definite political knowledge and enlarged as an illustration of the vulnerabilities of nations and kingdoms, establishing an urgent need for prudential judgment in sovereigns and their counselors. In turn this propels the treatise toward an increasingly rhetorical use of examples, mediated through figures such as Geoffrey Fenton, in order to cultivate this faculty of judgment in its readers.