Famous debate between E. Barbaro and G. Pico della Mirandola in 1485 concerning humanism and scholasticism and the role of rhetoric.

In order to combat arbitrary interpretations that make Machiavelli in a "monument" of Western culture and The Prince in a work full of excessive responsibility, this article brings us back to the author's biographical time. We analyze the specific context in which Machiavelli lived and wrote The Prince , a short treatise that today seems to have lost its most authentic historical sense. Besides this biographical immersion, the article discusses issues relating to the composition, flow, content and fortune of The (...) Prince. (shrink)

Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing. Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge", postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the (...) "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions. The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers. (shrink)