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although machiavelli's the prince was well received when it first appeared in print in 1532, by the mid-sixteenth century an anti-Machiavellian movement began taking shape. In 1559 the church banned the book and placed it on the Index librorum prohibitorum (Procacci 1995, 83-121; Godman 1998, 303-333). Following the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572, many Protestants and Catholic moderates believed that the fanatical attack had been inspired by a Machiavellian form of political cynicism and cruelty (Anglo 2005, 164-82, 229-70). In 1576, the Protestant Innocent Gentillet published his Contre-Machiavel, which was not only the longest treatise on Machiavelli; it was also a learned, detailed attack on his philosophy of political pragmatism (Stewart 1969). Gentillet's work helped popularize Machiavelli, but mostly as a diaboli- cal author, defending the methods of tyranny (1576, 3). Thus, assailed from all sides, it was not clear that The Prince would become the founda- tional work that it did. Yet Machiavelli's work survived Gentillet's attack and the church's condemnation to become a staple of the philosophies of early modern statecraft. This happened through a complex series of works that examined and refashioned Machiavelli's radical version of political prudence.
The key to understanding the reception and transmission of Ma- chiaevelli's work lies in the writings of the great Dutch Tacitist and historical philologist, Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) (see Toffanin 1972). Of all the interpretations of The Prince, Justus Lipsius's had the great- est effect in disseminating a positive interpretation of Machiavelli's civil science. Arguably the most famous humanist of the end of the sixteenth century, Lipsius's Politicorum sive civilis doctrinæ libri sex (An- twerp: Plantin, 1589), or Politica (all citations in this article refer to Waszink 2004) defended The Prince, in particular Machiavelli's idea of prudence at precisely the time the Church and Gentillet moved to condemn it (Palacios 1945; Rice 1958).1 Machiavelli had altered the traditional meaning of prudence, transforming it from a moral eth- ic of action and politics into a method of pure political effectiveness justified by civic needs, otherwise known as "reason of state."2 Lip- sius clearly saw how Machiavellian prudence could be both accepted and useful in the political context of the religious wars of the end of the sixteenth century (see, in part, Soll 1998, or Taranto...