The Defeat of a Renaissance Intellectual: Selected Writings of Francesco Guicciardini

A papal advisor and sixteenth-century power broker, Francesco Guicciardini wrote voluminously throughout his time in service to the Medici. The texts in this volume chart his career chronologically, revealing an intellectual whose philosophy of self-interest failed not only to perceive the interests of others but ultimately to serve his own.

During Guicciardini’s life, Florentine politics was dominated by the struggle of republican leaders to retain civic political autonomy against the ambit...