Download Paul V. Murphy. Ruling Peacefully: Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and

1262
Reviews of Books
interpretations—so numerous that it is impossible to
explore them all in this review. At times in his haste to
punch holes in the historiography one feels that he
might not always give other historians their full due.
One might not accept all of Tooze’s interpretations, but
he has provided an outstanding treatment of the Nazi
economy that will spur debate and reassessment of the
literature for years to come.
MARK E. SPICKA
Shippensburg University
PETER STACEY. Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance
Prince. (Ideas in Context, number 79.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2007. Pp. ix, 341. $90.00.
In publications between 1978 and 2002, Quentin Skinner rearticulates the view, standard since Allan Gilbert’s Machiavelli’s “Prince” and Its Forerunners (1938),
that Niccolò Machiavelli subverts the “mirror of
princes” genre. Peter Stacey’s book depends on and
amplifies Skinner and others by backdating the pre-Machiavelli starting line and, in chapter one, by defining
Seneca’s Stoicizing De clementia as the paradigmatic
Roman defense of monarchy. Stacey’s next four chapters track Seneca’s influence on pro-princely writers
from the Regno to northern Italy, ca. 1200–1500. They
set the stage for Machiavelli’s head-to-head with Seneca in Il principe, treated in his last two chapters, followed by a postlude arguing that this text shaped early
modern theories of state sovereignty. Stacey’s thesis
marginalizes or ignores other key sources of these developments: the Bible, Roman law and its glossators,
non-Stoic philosophies, institutions, perceived historical models, and princely iconographies in visual art.
While admitting that Seneca is not the whole story, Seneca is the only story he wants to tell. The result is underinterpretation, overinterpretation, the strategic
omission of countervailing data, and a Senecanism
whose cogent placement in historical context is neither
attempted nor achieved.
Stacey’s Seneca is an ideologue, not the self-serving
hypocrite of later Roman historians or the beleaguered
mentor faced with the thankless task of persuading
Nero, his dedicatee, to act responsibly. While noting
appeals to the pseudo-Senecan Martin of Braga (510/
20–579) but not to the Carolingians’ “mirrors of
princes” or interest in De clementia, whose earliest
manuscripts date to the eighth century, Stacey opens
with the preface to Frederick II’s Liber Augustalis
(1231) and its commentators, followed by supporters of
later Angevin and Aragonese rulers of the Regno who
likewise sought to bypass its status as a papal fief. Figures not on signori payrolls, such as Albertano of Brescia and Giovanni of Viterbo, get a mention. But Stacey
concentrates on actual or would-be protégés of princely
courts, from Palermo to Naples to Milan to Padua to
Carrara. He omits the well-known Milanese propagandists Antonio Loschi and Francesco Filelfo. Two figures
whose significance he misjudges are Francesco Petrarch
and Coluccio Salutati. Petrarch freely shifted princely
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
puff-piece rhetoric from Naples to Milan, when he was
not laying the foundations of Florentine civic humanism. Attributing any stable political ideology to him is
illusory. Salutati’s claim to Stacey’s attention is one proforma letter of congratulation to a new ruler of Naples,
despite the Florentine chancellor’s long-standing commitment to republicanism in word and deed. As for proMediceans in the late quattrocento and their redefinition of civic and princely virtue, they fail to make the
cut since Stacey regards Platonism as politically irrelevant.
After an analysis of its use of Quintilian’s rhetoric but
without recalling Brunetto Latini’s sardonic critique of
Seneca flagged in chapter two, Stacey moves to Il principe. Here, he argues, Seneca replaces Aristotle, Cicero, earlier Florentine humanists, and the Christian
tradition as Machiavelli’s whipping boy. Rejecting Stoic
virtue as an end in itself and the constancy of the sage
in favor of virtù as bold, flexible action in mobilizing and
maintaining the prince’s power, Machiavelli assigns
control over half our actions to virtù, defying the Stoics’
deterministic if rational and providential fortuna. Although, in analyzing Seneca’s own rhetoric, Stacey
notes that he seeks to motivate Nero by advocating outcomes consistent with the honestum in terms of the utile,
he reads all Machiavelli’s means/ends advice as antiSenecan. Stacey also dismisses as ironic all passages in
Machiavelli’s works suggesting that princely rule can
ever benefit the ruled. Without citing the famous essay
of Garrett Mattingly (“Machiavelli’s Prince: Political
Science or Political Satire?” The American Scholar
[1958]), he concludes—as if it were an original idea—
that Il principe is a satire.
If so, Stacy neither raises nor answers the question of
why Machiavelli thought that his Medici dedicatee
would fail to grasp this fact and, instead of taking umbrage, would gladly reward him with a job. Nor is he
persuasive on the claimed influence of this text on early
modern sovereignty theories, to which Jean Bodin and
the international law tradition culminating in Hugo
Grotius made more palpable contributions. In sum,
Stacey’s effort to give Seneca his due yields a regrettably monocular study.
MARCIA L. COLISH
Yale University
PAUL V. MURPHY. Ruling Peacefully: Cardinal Ercole
Gonzaga and Patrician Reform in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America
Press. 2007. Pp. xxi, 290. $79.95.
“Patrician reform” is the key to Paul V. Murphy’s understanding of Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga’s ecclesiastical career. Murphy disagrees with those who would dismiss Gonzaga as little more than a worldly courtier—
even if he did father five children during his long life.
The last of his children was born in 1557, when he was
bishop of Mantua and desired to play a more active role
in clerical reform. Gonzaga’s critics go on to say that
even when he served as papal legate at the Council of
OCTOBER 2008