CIRCULATING TEXTS IN THE RENAISSANCE: SIMON PATERICKE’S TRANSLATION OF ANTI-MACHIAVEL IN ENGLAND
CIRCULATING TEXTS IN THE RENAISSANCE: SIMON PATERICKE’S TRANSLATION OF ANTI-MACHIAVEL IN ENGLAND

Summary/Abstract: Innocent Gentillet’ Anti-Machiavel (1575) was the first Renaissance treatise devoted to a full-scale study of Machiavelli’s works. The book had an important impact on the reception of Machiavelli in Elizabethan England even before its publication in English translation. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I examine Simon Patericke’s English translation of Anti-Machiavel (1602) by situating it within the larger context of the Elizabethan practice of translation. Patericke’s translation can be viewed as a successful exponent of the new, humanistinspired type of translation that emerged in the closing decades of the sixteenth century; a manner of translatingwhich was generally characterised by a greater faithfulness to the source text, by a new accuracy and a new “stylistic freedom”. Second, I consider the reasons that urged Patericke to choose for translation Gentillet’s book as well as his option to use as introduction to his translation the preface written by the translator of Anti-Machiavel into Latin, thirty years before. Furthermore, I study the impact of Gentillet’s treatise in the context of the Essex trial and argue that its publication in England involved a double movement: on the one hand, Gentillet was echoed by Francis Bacon in his prosecution of the Earl of Essex and his accomplices as Machiavellian traitors; on the other hand, Patericke translated and published Anti-Machiavel the year following the rebellion as a response and warning to what had been perceived as a sort of English Machiavellian movement.

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