Before Machiavelli: The Education of the Prince in Roger Bacon’s Edition of Secretum secretorum

• In Event: Rethinking Machiavelli through His Philosophical Sources

Abstract

Machiavelli scholarship acknowledges his debt to Roman sources. Little mention is made of the medieval tradition of the education of the Prince except as a foil for the real-politik of Machiavelli. This ignores the medieval tradition which begins with Roger Bacon and finds its expression in the Italian Philosopher, Alessandro Achillini (1463-1512). The latter edited his own version of the Secretum secretorum for a Renaissance audience. My argument is that Achillini provided contemporaries of Machiavelli with the one medieval text that provided a concern with the management of science and medicine in statecraft. This is a utilitarian ethic opposed to Aristotelian virtue ethics as found in many medieval authors. Anthony Parel in his book The Machiavellian Cosmos (Yale, 1992) notes this tradition. I will make it explicit.

Author

• Jeremiah Hackett, University of South Carolina