Medieval and Renaissance

The Deeds of Count Roger of Calabria and Sicily and of His Brother Duke Robert G by Kenneth Baxter Wolf

Publishing The Prince by Jacob Soll

The Deeds of Count Roger of Calabria and Sicily and of His Brother Duke Robert G

Kenneth Baxter Wolf

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

In the eleventh century, when the Normans began to leave their mark on southern Italian history, the region was a patchwork of competing religious and political interests. Historiographically speaking, Geoffrey Malaterra's portrayal of these Norman conquests is an intriguingly complex one, on one hand praising the Normans and their leader, Count Roger, for successes in the region and yet on the other offering a subtle critique of the Norman lust for domination.

Beyond its contribution to our appreciation of medieval historiography, The Deeds of Count Roger also fills a gap in the available literature pertaining to the earliest phase of Latin European expansion at the expense of Islam.

Kenneth Baxter Wolf is Professor of History at Pomona College. His previous books include: Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain; Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, translation and introduction; Making History: The Normans and their Historians in Eleventh-century Italy; and The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis Reconsidered.

Spring 2005
240 pages

Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism

Jacob Soll

Rights: World*
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

Jacob Soll's work goes behind the scenes of the making of the most influential books in early modern Europe to show how traditionally "absolutist" works were converted into manuals of political resistance. The works of Tacitus and Machiavelli, once reserved for princes intent on secret strategies of political dissimulation, became ripe for plunder as numerous editions of their works made their way into the hands of the potentially critical reading public during the seventeenth century. With new, easy-to-use versions of works such as The Prince, almost any literate person with access to a bookstore could learn much about the ruses of tyranny. Fusing the history of ideas with the history of the book, Soll's work enriches both genres by illustrating how the meaning of a particular book depended on when and in what form it was published. Where Robert Darnton has looked at the subversive influence of once popular but now obscure literature, Soll has chosen to look at the infamous political works still read by college students and historians today. Implicitly critiquing the history of philosophy in which scholars read "classic" texts, Soll shows that these works never achieved a fixed or stable edition. Rather, every new publication altered the political uses and social meaning of these works.

In this history, one figure, Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye (1634-1706), stands out, for his edition of The Prince was the most popular version of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A diplomatic aid and translator, Amelot made his fortune popularizing the skeptical literature by authors such as Machiavelli, Tacitus, Justus Lipsius, Paolo Sarpi, Barthasar Gracian, and La Rochefoucauld. In translating these works, Amelot also transformed them, altering their form and meaning through his prefaces and commentaries, while marketing them to a general audience. His critical editions were an international success: his translations were translated. When Pierre Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Gibbon read Machiavelli's The Prince, they read Amelot's "how-to" version.

Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show that the very sphere of political criticism and the terms of public debate were absolutist creations which were in turn appropriated by critics of the crown. Beyond coffee shops and salons, Soll shows for the first time how the public sphere in fact grew out of the learned and even royal libraries of erudite scholars and the bookshops of subversive, not-so-polite publicists of the Republic of Letters.

Jacob Soll is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University.

May 2005
216 pages

*Italian rights are not available