Lehal Library

Huguenots, the book described Catherine as a compulsive reader of Machiavelli and, playing on a­ nti-­Italian feeling, claimed that both queen and writer were representative of a callous and villainous trait in Italian national character. Listed out of context, the ideas developed in The Prince were schematized and simplified, allowing readers to imagine they had read Machiavelli himself when what they were actually getting was a travesty that legitimized any form of brutality and rejoiced in amoral calculation. From this point on, Machiavelli’s name escaped from the restricted circle of intellectual reflection and became a popular term of denigration. ‘Mach Evil’ and ‘Match‑­a‑­ villain’ were typical English corruptions, ‘Mitchell Wylie’ a Scottish. Many critics would not bother reading his work in the original but take their information from Gentillet, whose ‘­Anti-­Machiavel’, as his book became known, was quickly translated into Latin for English readers and then, some twenty years later, directly into English. At this point (the end of the sixteenth century) the first English trans- lation of Machiavelli’s work was yet to appear. Ironically, in the years after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, as Catherine de’ Medici struggled to find some solution to France’s civil wars, and in particular to convince Catholics of the need to tolerate the existence of the Huguenots, if only in Huguenot enclaves, both she and her supposed mentor Machiavelli once again came under attack, this time from the Catholic side. The accusation now was that, in the attempt to avoid conflict, religious