to hell with men and meaning vesting authority in machiavelli's belfagor

To Hell with Men and Meaning! Vesting Authority in Machiavelli's "Belfagor"Author(s): Sante MatteoSource: Italica, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 1-22Published by: American Association of Teachers of ItalianStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3655969 .Accessed: 13/03/2014 15:00

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To Hell with Men and Meaning! Vesting Authority in Machiavelli's Belfagor Will the Real Machiavelli Please Stand Up? It is all too common for a study on Machiavelli to begin - as this one

is about to do - by rehashing the radically contradictory interpretations that his writings have received over the centuries and continue to elicit today. The diversity of interpretations is often attributed to the readership, to the fact that different reading publics have interpreted the texts with their own particular perspectives and agendas. Thus, each age and each society finds and nurtures the Machiavelli that best suits its own peculiar needs and aspirations. For instance, for British readers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries his works embody the hypocrisy, duplicity and amorality of papist Italy, to the extent that the term "Machia- vellian" entered the English language to indicate cunning, deception, and bad faith; whereas within the Italian Risorgimento his works seem to champion Italian unity and independence while promoting moral fervor and ethical considerations in political affairs. Hence, for some he is the least ethical and for others the most ethical of writers: "From a single seed, planted on different soil, have grown various forms of Machia- vellism and antimachiavellism, monarchist readings and populist ones, reactionary interpretations and Marxian rewritings" (Spackman 137).1

Nevertheless, the fact that interpretations disagree so radically cannot be attributed merely to the various whims of particular readers or reading communities, for on the surface at least, the author does appear to contra- dict himself from text to text, with the result that partisans of a particular view tend to favor one text over another. For example, some concentrate on The Prince because in it he seems to be promoting a principality as the best form of government while others favor the Discourses, in which he advocates a republic as the highest and most desirable form of government.2

Nor is the confusion restricted to contradictions between texts, since contradictory readings often spring from the same text. In The Prince, for example, is Machiavelli truly advocating rule by a strong prince, as he seems to say, or, as many insist, has he produced an ironic text whose aim is to unmask the false facade of monarchic lordship by revealing the deceit and violence which undergird it? If he is promoting a principality in good faith, does he mean it to be a permanent condition, as the best form of government to ensure stability and order, or just a temporary, stop-gap remedy to deal expediently with contemporary ailments, meant to last only until conditions be more conducive to forming a republic as

ITALICA Volume 79 Number 1 (2002)


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the more desirable form of government? Does the treatise preach the importance of historical immanence and self-determination in human affairs and tell us that history and societies are products of human choice and human agency, or by insisting that history is a series of recurring cycles and that the basic "nature" of people is unchanging and universal, does it profess a deterministic historical essentialism?3 Does it say that we should abandon our ethical ideals, or at least tailor them to fit reality and the vicissitudes offortuna and realpolitik, or rather, by insisting on the importance of virtu as the ability to control and mold our circumstances, does it claim that reality can and must be subjugated to our will, which in turn should be guided by communal, possibly even transcendent ideals of justice and goodness, so that chaos and strife will not reign in society? A case could be made, with strong supporting textual evidence, that the author of this treatise is a monarchist or a republican, an idealist or a mate- rialist, a moralist or a pragmatist, a humanist or an anti-humanist.

Incipit and/or Continuatio: Belfagor's Contrariness It is this very semantic ambiguity, what might be termed Machiavelli's

textual contrariness, that is intriguing. Machiavelli's little "favola" Belfagor Arcidiavolo is an illustrative text in this regard. It is a strange literary hodgepodge, a textual Frankenstein monster, coarsely stitched together from disparate elements. Its plot consists mainly of two separate stories that have little to do with each other. In the first half, the arch-devil Belfagor is chosen for a spy mission on Earth: to find out if the claims of the damned are true, namely that wives are the cause of all sins. Belfagor, assuming human form as Roderigo di Castiglia, with a fortune of 100,000 ducati, goes to Florence to seek a wife. He weds Onesta, of an impoverished branch of the old and illustrious Donati family, and before long his marriage turns out indeed to be an unbearable ordeal. His demanding, unreasonable wife drives him to bankruptcy and a desperate flight from his many creditors.

The second part of thefavola then deals with the relationship between Belfagor and Gianmatteo del Brica, a peasant who saves him from his pursuers by hiding him under a pile of manure. The devil devises a scheme to reward the peasant for saving him: he will possess the daughter of a rich family and allow Gianmatteo to exorcise him out of her body and thus obtain a reward. The first to be possessed is a rich merchant's daughter in Florence, whose exorcism nets Gianmatteo 500 Florins, enough to buy a podere and thus change his social status. The second possession is of the daughter of the king of Naples, Carlo Re, for which he gets an even larger sum, over 50,000 ducats, making him a very wealthy land- owner. At this point Belfagor decides that his debt is paid and warns Gianmatteo not to try to exorcise him anymore. Unfortunately, Gian- matteo's fame has spread too far and wide for him to go into early


Machiavelli's Belfagor 3

retirement as an exorcist. When Belfagor possesses the daughter of the king of France, the king sends for the farmer and commands him to per- form the exorcism or be hanged. Since the devil refuses to leave, it looks as if Gianmatteo will hang.

It is Gianmatteo's clever ruse to escape this fate that finally links his story back to that of Onesta, the terrible wife. He asks the king to orches- trate an elaborate audio-visual pageant with flashy dothes and blaring instruments. Belfagor, inside the body of the king's daughter, wonders what all the commotion is about. Gianmatteo tells him that it is to cele- brate the arrival of Onesta, his wife, at which news Belfagor abandons the body of the princess and flees directly back to hell. Gianmatteo thereby returns home with immense wealth. The fable thus ends with two morals: "E cosi Belfagor tomato in inferno fece fede de' mali che conduceva in una casa la moglie. E Gianmatteo, che ne seppe piu che il diavolo, se ne ritornm tutto lieto a casa" (179).4 One moral articulates the misogynistic impulse of the first story, while the second moral affirms the value of will and wit in a struggle against adversity and seemingly overwhelming, indeed supernatural odds. The two morals, like the two stories, do not seem to be related in a fundamental way, but seem to be cobbled together arbitrarily.5

The incongruity is not limited to the twofold plot: the time frame is also inconsistent. The first possession refers to an event that actually took place in Florence in 1466, shortly before Machiavelli's birth (1469) and well within the memory of older Florentines when the story was written, around 1515. However, the Carlo Re of the second possession most likely refers to Charles of Anjou, who had been king of Naples two centuries earlier, 1226-1285, while Louis VII, the French king of the third possession, reigned a century before that, 1137-1180.6 The narrative first takes Belfagor from the timeless, mythical realm of hell to a real, contemporary setting, Florence, and then, in the second part of the story, moves outward in geographical and social space and backward in time: from interacting with recent, local figures and events in the first exorcism to ever more remote historical figures and geographical locales in the subsequent exorcisms, thus extending the discourse back into the realm of legend. Although Machiavelli called his text afavola, he included references to real, contemporary Florentine families as well as less clearly defined past historical figures. The story's end also has a twofold destination: Belfagor heads out of this world, back to hell; Gianmatteo heads back to Florence, the realm of the real here and now. The textual journey is thus an ambivalent one, going in different directions, back and forth from hell to Earth and from present to past: a shuttle in and out of reality.

All this textual confusion has been foreshadowed in what Hale calls the "mock erudition" (xiv) of the very first lines of the favola, which are virtually schizoid in their profusion of authorial voices, narrative sources, and discursive and textual situations and imagery (169):


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Text Comments "Leggesi an impersonal subject reading a written text "nelle antiche memorie delle a font of communal memory or history within fiorentine cose a specific community "come gia s'intese per relazione still impersonal, but now one hears an oral

discourse, rather than reading a written one "di alcuno santissimo uomo now an individual source, rather than an imper-

sonal or communal one, but a mysterious, unidentified, yet supposedly widely known person: a hermit, visionary, local saint? - a character who is never mentioned in the text again

"la cui vita, apresso qualunque in linking the individual with the entire com- quelli tempi viveva, era celebrata munity and suggesting that they, in celebrating

his life, might actually also be the source of the stories attributed to him

"che standosi abstratto nelle sue now a mystical vision, rather than a written text orazioni vide, mediante quelle or oral utterance, but one resulting directly

from his orazioni, prayers, oral utterances, thus imbricating the visual with the oral

"come andando infinite anime di through the vision we have now moved from quelli miseri mortali, che nella the human community to a universal and trans- disgrazia di Dio morivano, cendental locus, hell, and an infinity of souls all' inferno, rather than a specific community "tutte o la maggior parte si no longer an impersonal subject; the assertion dolevano non per altro che per which motivates the whole story - that wives avere preso moglie essersi a are responsible for all sinning and perdition tanta infelicita condotte." - is now attributed, through an eye- and

ear-witness account, to all the souls of hell, or the majority of them.

There are references to a great variety of sources for this story: from written memoirs and community archives to various oral accounts and utterances: prayers, gossip, overheard and retold tales; from one individual's mystical vision to general public knowledge and communal tradition - what "everyone" knows and accepts. The very attempt to explain where the story originated makes it difficult to discover its exact origin, producing instead a multifaceted disassociation between the author, his tale, and his reader. Indeed, the very notion of authorship, along with the idea of authority implicit in the term, seems to be put in crisis, since the allusions to various sources and means of transmission make it impossible to identify one specific, authoritative, original source that will assume responsibility for the story.7

After this perplexing preamble, specific characters take the stage, and the narrative proper starts. Pluto, the chief devil and lord of hell, con- venes and addresses a council of "tutti gl'infemali principi" to decide



what to do, and eventually the lot falls to Belfagor to go investigate the matter. Nothing in the text indicates whether the holy man, as a result of his mystical experience, also witnessed these subsequent scenes and dia- logues in hell and those that then follow on Earth. The language of the first sentence, if anything, suggests that his vision and testimony were limited only to the opening scene in which the damned men complain about their wives, which means that the story that follows about Belfagor's adventures on Earth is to be attributed to yet another source, or to no source at all. In either case that part of the preamble that attempts to list sources would turn out to be a gratuitous or spurious appendage that had little or no connection with the rest of the story. The text could thus be expressing ambivalence about the use of "authoritative" sources. John Najemy points out how the humanist reliance on the authority of ancient sources placed the writer in a paradoxical double bind: "The dilemma of the 'uomo litterato' was that his standing in relation to his contemporary political master depended on his success in reviving and representing the voices of his ancient masters: he existed in making them speak; but in becoming their voice he muted his own" (63). To compound the ambivalence, he notes that in Latin a "litteratus was, in one sense, a learned or liberally educated person, but could also be someone or something lettered in the sense of being marked with letters and thus branded, as... a servus litteratus, or branded slave" (71-72). The narrator thus goes through the motions expected of the litteratus while resisting and possibly ridiculing such submission to past authority.

Toward the middle of the tale, which is otherwise told strictly in the third person, the narrator unexpectedly pops into the narration with a passing first-person self reference: "Io voglio lasciare ire le grande spese..." (172). This incursion tells us not only that there is an "I" telling this tale but also that this agent makes decisions about what goes in and what stays out of the text, and therefore can claim responsibility for it. However, this "I" makes only this singular appearance and does not constitute a significant presence in what is essentially an objective, third-person narration. Its function seems to be to sabotage the text rather than to appropriate it definitively as its own; to contest the authority of the objective narrator, who otherwise holds the reins of the narration, as well as the allusive authority of the (possible) textual sources paraded out at the beginning; in essence, to add another voice to the ever more cacophonous mix. The text thus sets up a series of claims and counterclaims about its own production, each refuting the others: these are events that took place and were recorded (objective third-person narration); no, this is the creation of a willful "I" (subjective first-person narration); no, it is of transcendent origin, mediated through the mystical vision of an unassailable saintly man, and elaborated by a variety of communal channels.

Even syntactically there is the semblance, and at the same time the denial, of a connection between the first sentence (the preamble) and second


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sentence: "Donde che Minos e Radamanto insieme con gli altri infernali ne avevano maraviglia grandissima" (169). The first words of the second sentence, and hence of the narrative proper, "donde che," should function as a subordinate conjunction, but are used to start a new sentence. They thus make it appear as if the story is subordinate to and dependent on the preamble, while the punctuation indicates that it is independent of it. The punctuation is in the autograph manuscript as reproduced by Grazzini (147), and not to be attributed to editors. Machiavelli frequently starts sentences with a subordinate conjunction or a relative pronoun. It amounts to a syntactic version of beginning in medias res, suggesting that the sentence (or thought) is an incomplete fragment by itself and that for its completion it must be linked to past and future statements. On a scriptorial level this stylistic habitus is analogous to Machiavelli's general mode of thinking and composing, which Barbara Godorecci characterizes as a process of "re-writing" on a palimpsest, "separating, while at the same time binding" (9).

If the aim of the preamble is to identify an authoritative source, it fails by proliferation and vagueness, whereas if its aim is to hide the real source, it is counterproductive, since the identity of the source would be more effectively hidden by simply not calling attention to the issue of sources and origins. What ends up being revealed is the process itself of calling up, then camouflaging, and eventually dismissing the various sources of the textual discourse, thus calling our attention to issues and problems which would not occur to us if we were to plunge directly into the story itself. The device leads us to ask ourselves at the outset, before lapsing into the role of passive listeners or readers, about the meaning of, and the relationship between, authorship and authority, language and power, story and history, representation and reality.

Discursively - or in what the Russian Formalists called the syuzhet, the arrangement of details as they are presented in the text - the progression of the preamble proceeds from written documents, to oral accounts, to a mystical vision. Chronologically - or in the fabula, the sequence of events as they would have occurred in "real time" - the progression is in the opposite direction: the mystical vision happened first, then oral transmission of it, and finally written versions. As to the identity and interaction of locutors and interlocutors we have a similar inversion: tex- tually the order is from an impersonal agent, to a community, to an individual; chronologically, from an individual, to a community, to general knowledge. In other words, the discourse moves chiastically in two opposite directions at once: both toward and away from conflicting des- tinations: life and afterlife, the physical world and the metaphysical.

The ensuing story results from superimposing chiasmal vectors on each other: men going from this life to the afterlife and a devil going from hell to this life. It is difficult to say which is the ground and which the projection in this chiasmus: whether the metaphysical world (hell)



is an illusory invention created by the fabulations of the real world, or if "reality" itself is an illusory projection grounded in and defined by the dictates of our metaphysical worlds, that is, if human thought and behavior and earthly life in general are shaped by a society's metaphysical notions, such as those contained in the concepts of heaven and hell. Again the text seems to want it both ways.

Investing and Divesting in Hell and in Marriage What is immediately striking about the hell of this story is how

unhellish it is. There is no description of the punishments inflicted on the damned. It is very much like a Renaissance court or city-state. The devils are called infernal judges and infernal princes. Their concerns are bureau- cratic and ethical: seeking out the truth behind the accusations and measuring the consequences for their own reputation, so that, in the words of their leader Pluto, they will not be "calunniati come troppo creduli" or "poco amatori della iustizia" (170).

This whimsical depiction of devils as concerned magistrates and lords who are worried about how they and their realm are perceived could be poking fun at the idea of hell, by pointing out that it is merely the mirror projection of our own societies; or it could be making fun of earthly societies, by pointing out that there is more concern for truth and justice in hell than on Earth. Pluto's initial address to his fellow demons, like the preamble, contains telling contradictions:

Ancora che io, dilettissimi miei, per celeste disposizione e fatale sorte al tutto inrevocabile possegga questo regno, e che per questo io non possa essere obligato ad alcuno iudicio o celeste o mondano, nondimeno, perche gli e maggiore prudenza di quelli che possono piu sottomettersi piu alle leggi e piu stimare l'altrui iudizio: ho deliberato esser consigliato da voi come, in uno caso il quale potrebbe seguire con qualche infamia del nostro imperio, io mi debba governare. (169-70)

Some readers, such as Ruffo-Fiore, find the speech admirable, in that it advocates both a democratic process and a commitment to discover the truth: "Pluto is more wise than the earthly kings ... and hell is a much better place to live than earth" (128). Others, such as Bondanella, think that the irony is directed at the devils themselves: "The opening sentence is a perfect unconscious revelation of the devils' pride and arrogance ... [and] suggests Pluto's pomposity and blindness to his own limitations, which all the devils share. The closing phrase, referring to Pluto's belief that his kingdom has always been well regarded, only adds to the ridicu- lousness of his words" (109). As with the text as a whole - or Machiavelli's oeuvre as a whole - it is impossible to choose one correct interpretation. The speech functions as a second preamble to the tale, which echoes the contradictory confusion of the initial sentence. Pluto, the character who


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serves as the intradiegetic instigator of the story, goes through the same paradoxical motions of appropriation and disavowal as the narrator.

In economic terms, the text and its characters participate in a paradoxical, simultaneous process of investment and divestiture. Pluto insists on simultaneously claiming and refusing authority and responsibility: he proclaims that he is the undisputed, absolute ruler, but says that it is better to follow the advice of his followers, and therefore leaves the decision up to them. He says that his authority derives from "celestial determination," which suggests that a supernatural design by a greater power is behind it, but also from a "fatal sorte," which is more ambiguous, since "sorte" can mean either an unforeseeable, deterministic, supernatural force - fate or destiny - or an equally unpredictable but more haphazard force beyond the control of individuals - random chance or luck. In the latter case the expression "fatal sorte" would be an oxymoron: fated unpredictability. Pluto, like the storyteller(s), asserts his power while abdicating it, and justifies his authority while abnegating it.

When it comes time to choose who will go to investigate the matter on Earth neither the leader nor the assembled devils assert their authority, nor does anyone individually assume responsibility by volunteering, and so the decision is left to chance (sorte again, but clearly with its second meaning): "deliberorno che la sorte fussi quella che lo dichiarassi" (170). The oxymoron implicit in that "determined chance" suggests that Pluto and his devils want events to be in their power but outside their responsibility. As a result, when Belfagor leaves for his adventures on Earth the issues of free agency and individual responsibility have been severely clouded: he does not go of his own free will but is sent by a combination of Pluto's power, the council's deliberations, and the luck of the draw. Again, the potential sources of authority proliferate, only to be mitigated. Furthermore, the stage is set for Belfagor himself to be able to claim authorization ("by the power vested in me ...") but disclaim responsibility ("it's not my fault; the devils made me do it!"), following the pattern established by the narrator's prefatory first sentence and Pluto's speech.

This recurring pattern adumbrates a process of investment and divestment that will characterize Belfagor's involvement in the two ensuing stories of the fable: in both he invests in an identity and a situation only to be eventually divested of both. He "invests" in two senses of the word: making an investment, as of money, goods, or effort, in order to obtain a profitable result; and in the etymological sense of Latin investire, to clothe or surround, and by extension to furnish an office, a rank, or a position of authority or power.

In the first episode, in addition to a large amount of monetary capital, he is invested with other kinds of social capital, such as youth, good looks, and cosmopolitan experience. These attributes reveal what his new society values in determining a man's worth, as a new husband and head of a household and as a new citizen in their midst. He is 30 years



old, old enough to have acquired experience, maturity, and standing, but young enough to retain physical energy, sexual vigor, and entrepreneurial and social momentum for future achievements. He has physical good looks enhanced by elegant clothes and a large retinue of servants to advertise his wealth and his social position and his ability to provide a rich and impressive household and a comfortable standard of living to a future wife. He also has an intriguing, cosmopolitan personal history, which includes travel and profitable residence in exotic foreign places, attesting to his knowledge of the world and human nature and to his spirit of adventure. He even has a socially seductive name, Roderigo di Castiglia, which associates him with the new nation state of Spain, the ascendant, rich, powerful new kid on the European block.8 Just as the impoverished Donati family hopes to re-invigorate itself with Roderigo's riches, so could Florence and other Italian city-states revitalize themselves by an alliance with the nouveau riche nation, whose lucrative trans- Atlantic trade routes displaced the Mediterranean mare nostrum as the main thoroughfare of economic, military, and cultural power.

Characteristically, however, this potentially empowering attribution of origin is half-hearted: Roderigo is made to be not from Spain exclusively, but from somewhere else as well. In order not to have his ancestry traced (since as a devil he does not have human ancestry), he claims that as a child he left Spain and went to Syria and earned his riches in the city of Aleppo. He associates himself with both the new and the old commercial circuits, thus compounding his cachet among Florentine merchants. Grazzini suggests that, given this background and the fact that he goes to Florence to exercise the art of usury, Machiavelli might have meant Roderigo to be taken for a Sephardic Jew, expelled from Spain in 1492, and now hiding his identity (37). Whether he is to be seen as a persecuted Jew or as a self-exiled Spanish Christian, for the purposes of this analysis what matters is that the character Roderigo is thus provided with two passports so that he can both claim and deny a legitimate provenance: a condition shared by Belfagor and Pluto and by the narration itself.

Invested with economic and social capital, Roderigo gets what he seeks: a wife and a lofty status in society. However, largely due to those same attributes he also ends up losing everything. His ability to attract the beautiful Onesta turns on him as she gains mastery over him, turning his love into slavery and making him acquiesce to her every whim. His exalted economic and social position, which he feels compelled to retain at all costs, leads him to overspend and then overborrow. He is imbued with all the attributes valued by society in order to conquer that society, only to be himself seduced and conquered by those same values, with his ruin brought about by his "successful" marriage, high credit rating, and rich lifestyle.

There are several "lessons" one could tease out from this first episode. It could be an attack on the institution of marriage, bemoaning the fact


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that it was an arrangement based on economics rather than on love; or, conversely, it could be a cynical malediction of love itself, showing that the person who falls in love becomes a helpless victim, sacrificing will and virtu to someone else's power. Or, somewhat less cynically, the story could be criticizing the excessive pomp and ceremony of Florentine society and the obsession to outdo others in possessions and visible manifestations of wealth. Even less cynically, indeed somewhat idealistically, it could be read as a parable attacking the practice of usury, and by extension Florence's historical reliance on her vaunted banking system and capital investment, rather than on more tangible products, suggesting that a community that ends up determining the worth of people, institutions, activities, and situations by their capital value has lost sight of more real values on which a society should be based: hence that excessive interest in capital wealth becomes a sign of social corruption, undermining the value of skills and intelligence.9 Belfagor/Roderigo himself could sym- bolize the rich person who has not earned his wealth through his own efforts, since his immense wealth was simply given to him as part of his disguise. An equation would thus be suggested between wealth and hell, between devils and the rich, especially usurers and those who use money to speculate. Furthermore, when Roderigo accedes to his wife's demands by staking her three brothers in their business ventures he extends the circle of unearned wealth, since there is no indication that they have the skills, experience, or intelligence to succeed. In fact, all three fail in their ventures, thus bringing Roderigo to ruin.

The message could thus be that money is an evil that comes from the devil and corrupts humans, were it not for the fact that the story is ultimately not about how the three brothers are ruined by their association with the devil, but about how the devil is ruined by his association with them and other humans. His money is provided through the magical powers of the devils but does not belong to hell; rather it is one of the human props deemed necessary for him to play his role on Earth. In other words, in this parable money is an evil that comes from humans and corrupts the devil. As an economic agent, therefore, Belfagor/ Roderigo is both a perpetrator and a victim, made powerful and power- less by his wealth, mirroring the other paradoxical dichotomies we have found articulated throughout the text.

In psychological terms the parable could be about integrity: the three brothers and Roderigo fail because they allow themselves to play roles outside their ken; they sacrifice their true selves to fit society's image of success. Consequently, having learned this lesson, in the second episode Belfagor reverts to his real self, or revests himself as devil, and reinvests himself with devilish powers to pay back Gianmatteo for saving him from his pursuers. There is no explanation about why Belfagor is no longer bound by the conditions of his mission to Earth: that for a period of ten years he be subject to all human afflictions without having



recourse to his supernatural powers, restricting himself to human resources, specifically "inganno e astuzia" (171). If he was going to default on his commitment and resume his demonic powers, it would have made more sense to do so while fleeing from his pursuers, before suffering the indignity of hiding in the manure pile and without incur- ring a debt to Gianmatteo.

This unexpected reversion contributes to the sense that the two episodes are substantially unrelated stories. However, just as at the end of Machiavelli's sentences we often find a period incongruously followed by a subordinate conjunction, which together serve as both a gap and a bridge, conveying a sense of closure as well as continuity, so in the second episode there is at least one incongruous element that seems to be a left- over trace from the first episode: the name Roderigo. Despite the fact that Belfagor no longer appears in human guise, both Gianmatteo and the narrator continue to refer to him by his human name until the very end, when it is finally Belfagor who returns to hell. The misnaming suggests that, though Belfagor has resumed his demonic identity, he does not entirely stop being the man Roderigo. The image of Roderigo has been superimposed on a portrait in which various other identities, or vestments, have conglomerated. Belfagor's identity is not determined inde- pendently, by his own volition, but in part by his previous experiences and by the expectations and demands of those with whom he interacts, such as Gianmatteo. Like the preamble's allusions to previous accounts, this persistent use of an elapsed name suggests that nothing starts as a blank slate, nor exists in isolation. In determining identity - and in searching for meaning or truth, as in Belfagor's investigative mission on Earth - there is always a background and a context to take into account.

In the cycle of perpetual investment/divestment there is a third man- ifestation of the process: what we might call revestment (re-clothing): in the sense of reinvesting or reinstating, hence a dynamic process of start- ing over, of renewal and regeneration; but also in the sense suggested by the French-derived form of the same word, revetment, which means an embankment or barricade and thus suggests static entrenchment and immobility, a structure to protect and prolong the status quo: thus potentially both a progressive and a conservative proclivity. In Belfagor's case we have seen that he suddenly goes back to being a devil (revests), as if that is the default mode to which he automatically returns unless prompted to do otherwise. The problem with that scenario is that Belfagor did not start out as a devil: "arcidiavolo, ma per lo adietro, avanti che cadessi di cielo, arcangelo" (169). The fact that "archangel" is not his default mode implies that his true self is not necessarily his original self, but a previous self. Roderigo's previous incarnation was as Belfagor in hell, and so he reverts to Belfagor. But paradoxically the previous incarnation of the Belfagor who now roams the Earth and takes possession of the bodies of women was as the man Roderigo. Therefore, in a moment of crisis this


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Earth-bound Belfagor falls back on his immediately previous identity as Roderigo, the husband of Onesta. Not coming into the tale ex nihilo, but already "vested" with a previous identity, Belfagor has already undergone the process of in/di/re-vestment as an inevitable pattern of existence, what Ferroni calls Machiavelli's "anthropology of transformation" (84), which erodes the possibility of ever finding a genuine identity to which one can remain true. The self of this scenario, like Machiavelli's text, is more like a yo-yo than a bedrock; or, in Godorecci's more elegant image, it is a palimpsest, which allows for continuous re-writing while carrying traces of previous writings and erasures.

Ventriloquists, Transvestites, and Exorcists In the case of gender issues too, thisfavola, which appears to be patently

misogynistic from beginning to end, is perplexing, if not contradictory.0l For one thing, while Onesta is reportedly cruel and demanding, the real problems that lead to Roderigo's downfall are primarily of an economic nature, having more to do with bad investments and his own concerns about cass standing than with his marital relations. Furthermore, Onesta like Clizia in the homonymous play - remains curiously offstage throughout the narrative. All of Onesta's words and actions are reported indirectly, filtered through Roderigo's perception, and noted only for the consequences they produce in his state and in his behavior. She speaks only through him, or (which is not the same thing) he speaks for her.

A great deal of ventriloquism takes place in this text. From the start we do not know where the words are coming from: is the author (as ven- triloquist) throwing his own voice and speaking through all the sources he puts on stage, or are the various sources the ventriloquists speaking through him? Another form of ventriloquism becomes obvious in the second part, as Belfagor possesses the bodies of women and speaks through them, turning them into puppets with no voice or life of their own. It seems to be a clear allegorization of male appropriation and exploitation of both the female body and female discourse. In the first possession the young woman is significantly not identified by her own name but only by her relationship to men: as the daughter of Ambruogio Amidei and the wife of Bonaiuto Tebalducci. The symptoms that prove that she is bedeviled are that she speaks Latin and discusses philosophical issues, a language and subject matter apparently reserved for men. And yet the possession and the role reversal it implies have a double valence: the woman possessed by the devil takes up a male discourse, but the devil in turn inhabits a female body. In the second part of the tale, Belfagor appears only inside women's bodies, speaks only with women's voices, or at least with a woman's vocal apparatus, and looks at the world through women's eyes, thereby implying a certain degree of femi- nization. The character, the narrative, and the reader, in thus adopting a woman's perspective, albeit fleetingly and imperialistically, become better



aware of socially determined, and therefore arbitrary, gender roles. The community's misogyny is not only deployed, but also uncovered and put on display so that it may be perceived and possibly critiqued. On one level the episode shows that women cannot master Latin or philosophy; on another level it reveals that it is the phallocentric, patriarchal society that prohibits them from doing so, intervening, through exorcism if necessary, to restrict such acquisitions to men only.

The text does not explain why Belfagor chooses to possess only women. Perhaps it is out of a sense of revenge, to get back at "women" for what he has suffered at the hands of one woman; or perhaps women are reputedly easier to possess because their own sense of identity is weak and easy to displace; or they are more likely to be under the pro- tection of wealthy and powerful men - fathers or husbands - who will pay to have them restored to their proper womanly state. Another possibility is that, having been the victim and instrument of Onesta's designs, he now realizes what power women wield in manipulating men and determining the course of events and therefore attempts to exploit this power as a transvestite: transvesting himself as a woman. Though it may be farfetched to attribute such thoughts or motives to the character, or even to the narrator of the tale, it is not out of the question that they lurk beneath the surface of the text, if only as unuttered fears about female power, or as obliquely expressed guilt about unwarranted male dominance.1l

In the human phase of his incarnations Belfagor transvests himself first as male and then as female, first by altering his own appearance to look like a man and later by taking over and hiding himself inside the bodies of women. The first is a case of simulation and the second a case of possession. The implied difference seems to be that, whereas the devil can become a man, he can only possess, but not become, a woman, which in turn suggests that men and devils are interchangeable, as well as insubstantial, without a fixed identity, while women, though they can be possessed (by male language, ideas, and social structures), have more substance and permanence: they are there both before the possession and after the exorcism, whereas "Roderigo" appears out of thin air and then simply disappears from the face of the Earth.

Between the two sets of investitures, Belfagor hides in a pile of manure, which serves as a threshold between the two states. Manure is a symbol with ambivalent connotations: an end product, or waste, but also a fer- tilizing agent that helps bring about new life, or regeneration, hence indicating that the subsequent relocation into female bodies marks an ascent into a new, more fertile, revitalized existence. If the devil fails to take advantage of this new state or cannot cope with it, it may be because he remains tethered to his previous existence as the human male Roderigo and the presumably male devil Belfagor. It is Roderigo the man (and husband) who is frightened away and Belfagor the devil who


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goes back to hell, while the previously possessed women remain on Earth, freed of both man and devil.

It is curious that the hell to which Belfagor returns is apparently an exclusively male domain, since all the souls claim to be there not because of their "spouses," but specifically because of their "moglie," which would mean that only men go to this hell.12 Where are the women then? Since heaven is not even mentioned as a destination, a woman's place seems to be restricted to the Earth, back in the world where they live their lives and take care of business and their families (marrying off their sisters and finding jobs for their brothers, as Onesta does), while men and devils worry about blame and proof, ideals and truth, justice and reputation, and the affabulation of all these things in philosophical, scientific, political, or literary discourse.13 Hence men are superior to women only if words are superior to deeds and if hell is preferable to life in this world.

Judging the characters of this tale by the degree of Machiavellian virtu they possess, Onesta, the maligned wife, actually fares much better than her husband, the presumably powerful arch-devil and ex-archangel. She manipulates him to improve not only her own lot in life but that of her entire family. The tale's (and Machiavelli's) infamous misogyny may be only skin-deep, not permeated through every strand of the text's discursive fabric. Given Machiavelli's penchant for textual contrariness, a misogynistic thrust at one level is counterbalanced by a philogynistic thrust at another level, or at least a questioning of the misogynistic assumptions that the text conveys. The misogyny may belong primarily to the characters in the text (all male except for the off-stage wife and the three possessed daughters), more than to the text as a whole.

Cultural Crisis: Women Speaking Latin Devils and men are associated with the use of Latin and the practice

of philosophy, attributes of the humanist movement. The text's irony might therefore be directed at humanism itself and its legacy, suggesting that Italian thought and culture had been similarly possessed by the devil. In Jacobitti's interpretation of Machiavelli's cyclical view of history, societies, "having reached the highest stage of the cycle [through virtu] ... were easily seduced by the temptations of leisure. To Machiavelli, the most iniquitous of seductresses were letters, learning, and philosophy" (191). Belfagor might therefore be ridiculing the rational, neo-Aristotelian humanism of the Latin Averroists, such as Machiavelli's contemporary Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525), by showing that human behavior results from demonic influence or possession of some kind. Or it might be making fun of the Christian humanism of Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), by showing that there is apparently more concern for justice and truth in hell than elsewhere, and by depicting religious rituals as pageantry and theater, noise and spectacle signifying nothing (but effective in chasing the devil away, as it turns out). It might be criticizing the idealist, neo-Platonic



humanism of Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) and Pico della Mirandola (1463- 94), by suggesting that the notion of justice and a commitment to its implementation are stronger in hell than in human society, and inef- fectual in both places, since it is Gianmatteo's pragmatic expediency, and not his adherence to Platonic ideals, which gives him the upper hand. Furthermore, if a primary impulse of the humanist enterprise was to recuperate the classics, to go back to the original sources of the "human- ities," then it is that fundamental impulse which is mocked in the first sentence of the story, where the sources appear to be found but are actually lost, and authority (along with authorship) is both claimed and refuted.

All this radical ambivalence suggests that this is a critical text, a discourse in crisis and about crisis, produced in a moment of personal, social, political, and cultural rupture, and meant both to reflect and critique the conditions which brought the author and his society to such a turning point. The unparalleled economic, political, and cultural achievements of the Renaissance had reached a critical moment. The Italian city states, for the very reasons that made them thrive - e.g. local autonomy; intra- city and inter-city mercantile, social, and cultural competition; relatively fluid class structures - had been overcome by the new, centralized nation states, France and Spain, whose immense new power derived from the cohesion and the greater resources provided by unification: a national treasury, a national army, one national policy. The fragmented patchwork of small states in Italy faced a bleak future at the very moment when they had reached their artistic, literary, and cultural peak. Apogee and nadir came together in early-sixteenth-century Florence and were reflected in Machiavelli's texts: "Machiavelli was in a position to understand that the crisis was not only political and military;... the crisis was also religious and spiritual, and hence theoretical and linguistic in a word, 'literary'" (Dionisotti 32). Thought and literature in such conditions become both nostalgic and cynical, or at least ironic: longing for the certitude and authority of the past, but mistrusting and ridiculing any claims to be able to secure them, as evidenced in Ariosto's affectionate derision of the chivalry of yesteryear, and encapsulated in Castiglione's recipe for sprezzatura, a posture that embodies an uneasy admixture of grace and disdain.l4

The humanistic ideals that previously fueled the successes of the Italian Renaissance no longer made sense in this new global reality. In a moment of crisis old convictions of the past are lost, confusion reigns in the present, and the future is uncertain. A voice in crisis - a critical text, therefore - may not know exactly what it is saying, or what gives it the authority to speak; or rather what it knows and reveals is that all words and meanings and appearances have become unreliable and ambiguous, as Machiavelli confesses in a letter to Guicciardini: "for some time I have never said what I believed, and never believed what I said, and if I do


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sometimes happen to say what I think, I always hide it among so many lies that it is hard to recover it" (qtd. in Hale xvii-xviii). There is no longer any legitimate political or cultural authority to guarantee the value or the stability of language and meanings. Institutions of order and stability, including marriage and class standing, along with religious dogma and philosophical tenets, flounder. Machiavelli's fable echoes this instability: in the other world, angels become devils, and devils become men; in this world, spouses become enemies; old, established families become bankrupt; landless peasants become wealthy landowners.15 Or on the contrary, rather than symptoms of sickness, the text could be promoting these same developments and transformations as solutions, as the necessary corrections needed to bring about change or renewal to a moribund society.

And so we have come full circle: back to the polysemous indetermi- nacy with which we started, with Machiavelli acting as the saboteur of his own discourse. But if we could not determine whose was the first word in this text, perhaps we can say who has the last word. At the end of the tale Belfagor leaves the Earth for hell, a supernatural realm of unchanging rules and fixed states. If this eternal realm were the text's end of the line, the ending might imply that everyone is ultimately trapped in an eternal, predetermined cycle, wherein individual choice and agency are futile. However, the story also ends with the conclusion of another journey, with a different destination. The very last sentence is devoted to Gianmatteo's return to Tuscany: "E Gianmatteo, che ne seppe piu che il diavolo, se ne ritornm tutto lieto a casa" (179), which suggests that he has the last word and the upper hand in the end. Clever, resourceful, and now very rich, he will be better equipped to cope and thrive in the world than Belfagor/Roderigo, because he has a different kind of intelligence, one that can deal with contingencies. Unlike the denizens of metaphysical realms he is not concerned with eternal truths, only with pragmatic solutions to real situations: "What the peasant knows - how to make his way on earth - counts for more than the sum of the knowledge of heaven and hell" (Sumberg 246).

Thus Gianmatteo, the lowly, unlettered contadino, marginalized and disenfranchised from the centers of political power and cultural agency, like the women of his time, appears to avoid hell, not through his religious beliefs and philosophical ideals, but through his wits and pragmatic opportunism. When he heads back to Tuscany at the end, he could be a corrected version of Roderigo. He and his kind (i.e. those who do not know Latin or philosophy) can and must exorcise the evils that have taken possession of Florentine and Italian society. It is time for a new class, with different sensibilities and abilities, to take control of a Renais- sance that has gone bankrupt. On the other hand, the message could be that the society's bankruptcy has made it possible for such unfit and unworthy individuals as the unscrupulous Gianmatteo to achieve wealth



and status. Jacobitti notes Machiavelli's admonition in the Istorie fiorentine that class differences should be preserved: "one factor in the failure of Florence and the success of Rome lay, oddly, in the fact that Florence leveled out its divisions into an egalitarian homogeneity, while Rome preserved its noble and plebeian classes and the conflict between them" (189). Much like the manure pile with which he is first associated, Gianmatteo conveys ambivalent connotations. He could represent either the rotten fruit that marks the end of a season or the seed of a new beginning. Or, he may not represent an alternative at all, but simply a reitera- tion: newly vested with wealth, he heads to Tuscany, just as Belfagor/ Roderigo did at the beginning of the tale, and just as likely to suffer the same fate.

The ending is thus no less ambiguous than the beginning. The realm of contingency and pragmatic expediency, associated with Gianmatteo and Earth, seems to get the upper hand over the domain of eternal conditions and fixed ideals, associated with Belfagor and the supernatural. Never- theless, getting the upper hand is not necessarily advantageous, for as contemporary Florentine/Italian history demonstrated (as well as Machia- velli's own experience in the service of his city, for which he was first rewarded and then persecuted), to win is to lose. Humanist thought and art, along with the economic and social dynamism of the Renaissance, brought Italian culture to supremacy, but were also responsible for its sub- jugation and potential demise. Jacobitti attributes the paradox to a cyclical notion of history: "Seasons of triumphs . . . were also the incubation periods of hubris and decline, so that if a city overcame adversity it became hedonistic and dissolute and then succumbed to cities of greater virtu" (187). Picone, on the other hand, puts a different spin on the ending, claiming that to lose is actually to win, finding in the tale a

morale tutta terrena ... che addita la via dell'infemo per poter scoprire la via del paradiso, che accetta lo scacco come premessa alla vittoria, che riconosce insomma nella totale negativita umana la base necessaria su cui innalzare una teoria positiva della res publica. ("exemplum e novella" 148)16

Machiavelli dwells at the crux of the ascendancy of Florentine/Italian artistic culture and the decline of political and military power. The radical ambivalence of his texts mirrors the contradictions of the world he depicted, analyzed, and critiqued: a society which both wanted and feared a strong leader, valued (and derided) both pragmatism and idealism, advocated (and mistrusted) both free agency and determinism, promoted (and repudiated) both secular humanism and religious transcendentalism. Whether we see the writer as merely a bemused witness, passively reflecting the conflicts and crises of his times, or rather, as Jacobitti depicts him, a willful agent and provocateur, who actively promoted "an ideal of discord and struggle, of a ceaseless opposition to the idea of resolution


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represented by philosophy," convinced that "healthy life was conflictual" (192), in either case the conclusion would be the same: Machiavelli "forces us into a situation in which there are no answers" aacobitti 192). So, it is not that the real Machiavelli refuses to stand up and be recog- nized, but that he can only do so in various vestments and with diverse voices, ventriloquizing the contradictory, critical concerns of his society as if possessed by the demon of indeterminate meanings, whose name is Legion, for they are many.17

SANTE MATTEO Miami University

NOTES 1For a comprehensive account of Machiavelli's reception, see Giuliano Procacci's

Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell'eta moderna. For the early British reaction see chapter 8, "Aspetti della fortuna inglese del Machiavelli nei secoli XVI e XVII," 213-51. Machiavelli's fortune in the Italian Risorgimento is treated in chapter 11, "Letture e interpretazioni tra Illuminismo e Romanticismo," 366-79, and in chapter 12, "Machiavelli nella storiografia della prima meta del XIX secolo," 381-419.

2Maurizio Viroli attributes such disagreements to the fact that Machiavelli scholars fail to realize that he was writing as a rhetorician: "He did not write to explain a scientific or a moral truth, but to persuade and to impel to act. Yet, students of Machiavelli's political thought have been quite unaware of this important feature of his language.... As a result, we still do not know the kind of texts we are reading" (73). See also Victoria Kahn's rhetorical analysis of II principe, "Virtu and the Example of Agathocles in Machiavelli's Prince," and Albert Ascoli's "performative" reading of the treatise in "Machiavelli's Gift of Counsel," both in the volume edited by them, Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature.

3Vickie Sullivan, in her introduction to The Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli: Essays on the Literary Works, articulates the immanence/transcendence dichotomy in terms of the comic and tragic modes present in Machiavelli's writings: "a comic view, in which his sometimes playful but always pointed challenges to previous authority illumi- nate the way to human beings' mastery of the forces that have hitherto thwarted their earthly endeavors ... [and] a tragic view, in which human beings are always subjected to and often crushed by forces more powerful than they" (x). In the same volume Edmund Jacobitti points out that Machiavelli accepted the classical notion of history as a preordained cyclical process, but also believed that the nature and duration of the cycles were determined largely by active human intervention: "If . .. history is ... of limited but uncertain duration, then prudent action rather than passivity seems called for" (179).

4The quotations are from Franco Gaeta's edition, Niccolo Machiavelli: il teatro e tutti gli scritti letterari 169-79. Filippo Grazzini provides a paleographically more faithful version (137-53), which retains Machiavelli's spelling and punctuation, in his book- length study of "Belfagor," Machiavelli narratore, the most extensive stylistic and philo- logical study of the tale to date. English versions of the story may be found in The Literary Works of Machiavelli, edited and translated by J. R. Hale, and in Anthony J. Pansini's



voluminous omnibus, Niccolb Machiavelli and the United States ofAmerica, which contains translations of all of Machiavelli's writings: political, literary, and personal.

5Franco Manai's "Note sullafavola di Machiavelli: Gianmatteo, il villano piiu furbo del diavolo" (1987) provides a reasoned review of the main interpretative currents, centering around Luigi Russo's "realistic" interpretation (1937), which focuses on the tale's satire aimed at debunking superstitions, and Giorgio Barberi Squarotti's "struc- turalist" reading (1966), which emphasizes the "tragic" aspect of the struggle between ideals and reality. Manai holds that, while the first part of the story has elements of a traditional exemplum, and the second part has aspects of a typical facezia, with ingre- dients from Boccaccio's novelle thrown into the mix, in the whole Machiavelli's tale creates a new, ambiguous kind of comedy. Michelangelo Picone, in "La Favola di Belfagor fra exemplum e novella," situates the tale within an Italian/European as well as an Oriental tradition, citing as precursors various Latin exempla concerning both a devil who takes a wife and false exorcisms, as well as much earlier Oriental tales which probably filtered into Europe through oral channels, in particular, two strikingly similar tales from the (ukasaptati, le storie delpappagallo (the parrot's tales), 143-45.

6For a more detailed discussion of the chronological implications, see Grazzini 121-27. Michael Paden, who reads the tale as a political allegory of contemporary affairs, holds that the historical allusions are masks for figures of Machiavelli's own time: Carlo Re refers to Charles VIII of France (1470-98), who invaded Italy in 1494; Louis VII, "con una semplice sostituzione della V in X" (67), stands for his successor, Louis XII (1498-1515); Belfagor/Roderigo is Roderigo Borgia, or Pope Alexander VI; Onesta represents the Catholic Church (67); and Gianmatteo stands for the Florentine Republic and for Machiavelli himself (73).

7Grazzini points out the attribution to both oral and written sources in the incipit, and notes how attributing the vision to the mystic "raddoppia la distanza tra il testo e il suo autore" (13). A more detailed rhetorical analysis of the incipit may be found in Picone's "La Favola di Belfagor fra exemplum e novella" (1996), an assessment of how Machia- velli's tale appropriates and modifies elements from various literary and narrative genres and rhetorical strategies, which are revealed in the preamble, and in a subsequent article, "La Favola di Machiavelli: una lettura intertestuale" (1998), in which he shows how the various elements of the incipit serve to situate the text within literary tradition, with the aim of substituting a profane auctoritas for the sacred auctoritas of older sources (173).

8As mentioned in a previous note, Paden makes the further claim that no contemporary reader could fail to associate Roderigo with Pope Alexander VI, 1492-1503, of the Aragonese Borgia family (68). The pope's son, Cesare Borgia, Duke Valentino, is featured prominently in Il principe as an effective military and political conqueror.

9See the first chapter of Alfredo Bonadeo's Corruption, Conflict, and Power in the Works and Times of Niccolb Machiavelli, for a discussion of the role of wealth in the corruption of the times (11-16). See also Ronald Martinez, "Tragic Machiavelli," which concludes that: "Machiaveli foresaw all too well how the history of Italy was

shaping itself into a tragic plot" (119). 10Paolini observes: "Finora quasi tutti i critici si sono limitati soltanto ad includere

questa novella nella letteratura misogina" (120); and is himself convinced that it is "un attacco... contro la natura della donna" (121). For a survey of the misogynistic tradition


20 SANTE MATTEO

see Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, edited by Alcuin Blamires (1992), and particularly the excerpt from Jehan Le Fevre's The Lamen- tations of Matheolus, which is often cited as a probable source for Belfagor (177-97).

11In Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought ofNiccolo Machiavelli, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin probes the misogynistic nature of many passages in Machiavelli's writings, problematizing the apparent misogyny, both in him and in his community, by analyzing it in terms of Freudian repression and sublimation, showing that the texts reveal much more than they articulate on the surface; see especially pp. 307-27.

12By contrast, in La Fontaine's verse adaptation, Fable XXVII, Belphegor: Nouvelle tiree de Machiavel (1693), both men and women go to hell, and both husbands and wives are blamed: "Qui t'a jetee en l'eterelle flamme? / L'une disait: Helas c'est mon marie; / L'autre aussit6t repondait: C'est ma femme" (514), suggesting that the object of satire is the institution of marriage, rather than women per se. Randy Runyon, to whom I am grateful for bringing La Fontaine's version to my attention, analyzes the fable in relation to Machiavelli's version in In La Fontaine's Labyrinth: A Thread through the Fables 180-85.

13Pitkin points out that behind Machiavelli's call to "masculine" heroism - to sacrifice comfort and life for ideals, give preference to the public realm over the private, go to war and pursue glory - there lurks the repressed "feminine" view: "to cope with the true realities: to tend to the children, the harvest, the cooking and weaving that keep bodies alive" (326). Ronald Martinez also points out that the "vitality of the female" is in an "adversarial relationship to male virtiu" ("Benefit of Absence" 120).

14In addition to Hans Baron's classic study, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renais- sance, for a discussion of how socio-historical conditions in Florence and other Italian states affected literary paradigms see Carlo Dionisotti's fundamental study, "Machiavelli, Man of Letters," translated in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, edited by Albert Ascoli and Victoria Kahn, who, in their introduction, point out: "In this climate of political crisis, the failure of the humanist ideal of the vita activa (active life) was acutely felt.... Machiavelli's own ambivalent attitude toward literature reflects the tensions both within the humanist tradition and between humanist ideals and contemporary political events" (6). See also Franco Fido's study of the relation between Machiavelli's writing and the political events of his time, "The Politician as Writer," in which he demonstrates how "Machiavelli's creative and speculative processes are always influenced by the issues of the present" (145).

15For a discussion of Machiavelli's "inclination to undermine all he says" in his letters, and his "comic stance as the man who never said what he believed or believed what he said" (77) see Arlene Saxonhouse, "Comedy, Machiavelli's Letters, and His Imaginary Republics." John Freccero alludes to the socio-cultural instability of the period, claiming that Machiavelli follows Dante's lead in making moral judgments about political power, but "[u]nlike Inferno, Renaissance Italy provides no place to stand from which a moral standard might be applied to such advice. It is as if we were all in hell" (167).

16For an extended discussion of the dialectics of winning and losing, or of giving the appearance of doing either, see Albert Ascoli's "Pyrrhus' Rules: Playing with Power from Boccaccio to Machiavelli." In Clizia, the character Nicomaco, whose name alludes to



Machiavelli's own first and last names, "first embodies, then reverses the pyrrhic para- digm: having been a winner who lost, now his loss becomes a victory" (52).

17The paraphrase is from the account of Christ's exorcism in The Gospel of Mark 5.9: "And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many." Machiavelli has repeatedly been associated with the devil. Historian Patrick Curry and graphic artist Oscar Zarate begin their illustrated book, Introducing Machiavelli, with a cartoon of Machiavelli morphing into a devil, pointing out that: "his first name was often short- ened to 'Old Nick,' the popular nickname for Satan" (3). Others have speculated that the designation of the devil as "Old Nick" actually derives from Machiavelli's name. The Oxford English Dictionary cites its first occurrence in 1643, which lends at least circumstantial support to the thesis, since it occurred at the height of anti-Machiavellian fervor, when the term "machiavellianism" came to be widely used to refer to cunning and duplicity.

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Issue Table of ContentsItalica, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 1-145Front MatterTo Hell with Men and Meaning! Vesting Authority in Machiavelli's "Belfagor" [pp.1-22](Re)Considering Gadda and Futurism [pp.23-43]La voce del mare: Da Oceano mare di Baricco a La leggenda del pianista sull'oceano di Tornatore [pp.44-61]Il concetto di "verit" nella narrazione "al passato" di Marta Morazzoni [pp.62-79]Film and Story, about a Blue Dog: Who Saw God? [pp.80-94]"Pippo volava di sera": Unraveling the Mystery of a World War II Italian Narrative [pp.95-113]Reviewsuntitled [pp.114-116]untitled [pp.116-118]untitled [pp.118-120]untitled [pp.120-121]untitled [pp.121-122]untitled [pp.122-124]untitled [pp.124-125]untitled [pp.125-126]untitled [pp.127-128]untitled [pp.128-129]untitled [pp.129-130]untitled [pp.131-132]

Brief Notices [pp.133-135]Books Received 2001 [pp.136-139]AATI 2001 General Business Meeting [pp.140-144]Back Matter [pp.145-145]

to hell with men and meaning vesting authority in machiavelli's belfagor

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