SOURCE: "Proverbial Signs: Formal Strategies in Guicciardini's Ricordi," Annali d'Italianistica, Vol. 2, 1984, pp. 94-109.

In the following essay, Struever suggests that Guicciardini presented his Ricordi as a set of proverbs in order to express important ethical ideas in a traditional and therefore intimate, accessible form.

As long ago as 1939, Felix Gilbert demonstrated the usefulness of a textual analysis of the moral-political discourse of the Renaissance. He argued that a fundamental political reorientation can be diagnosed in the alterations in the genre of advice or counsel, for example, in reading Machiavelli's Prince as a transformation of medieval and humanist "Mirrors for Princes."¹ Since then, of course, Quentin Skinner, appealing to the initiatives of analytic philosophy of language, has advocated a more sophisticated project: the formal redescription of the Prince as a series of "speech-acts." Yet the fundamental assumption remains the same: for both Gilbert and Skinner, the structure of political...