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Thesis

Italian

ID: <

2268/149657

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The correspondence of Francesco Guicciardini as laboratory of political language and ideas

Abstract

this thesis, which arose from the desire to explore a textual body that was still unknown and exceptional in many respects — more than 5000 written documents covering the years 1499-1540, which was still being published by philologist Pierre Jodogne (1) — highlights the roles of ‘laboratory’ and ‘reserve’ of the correspondence between the flower thinker and politician Francesco Guicciardini. It shows that the letters of the famous Italian historiograph are a place for her language and thought, but also a kind of repertoire in which words and ideas are kept that feed into her non-epistolary production once. By analysing a group of five key political terms of the Ricordi — prudence, discretion, experience, conjecture and opinion — the study makes it possible to understand the work carried out by Francesco Guicciardini on the language of politics and the re-semantic process at the beginning of its writing at a crucial moment in florentine, Italian and European history. Guicciardini uses Guicciardini, which, without the use of new words but by successive approaches and syntactic artifices, lends terms inherited from the tradition of new meanings: for each of the words studied, there is a semantic shift from traditional uses. It also appears that the words envisaged cannot be considered separately because they constitute Guicciardini’s own system of interpretation of the real estate; in addition, these semantic nuclei are engraving, in other words, points of reference in a complex grid, which are all indicators of the author’s attempt to clarify. Examination of the lexicon in correspondence and works also provides information on the guichardinian modus operandi, since it makes it possible to show that the writing of letters, which continues over time and is marked by the need for action, helps to fuel and refine the author’s thoughts on ‘words’ and ‘things’, and that missives ensure a form of textual continuity between the other writers, historiography or more theoretical relevance. The path followed reveals similarities between functional and formal production, ranging from simple stylistic codes to self-citation, to the regular recovery of what may be called ‘conceptual nodes’, from the foundations of Guichardinian thinking. Furthermore, a detailed chronological analysis of the recurrence of certain reasons shows that, in several cases, the reflection was ‘hot’ in the letters before being reproduced and complicated in the other texts, Ricordi, the history of Italy but also the political discourses, which appear in a new light. Thus, not only does Francesco Guicciardini look at the facts a posteriori, but he also does so in the burning news of events: the texts studied testify to this continuous gap between action and conceptualisation, of a mental habus where reflections on concepts, arising from practice, provide cognitive and operative procedures, mental patterns that have been scrutinised by reason, which are quick to be reapplied to the urgency of the action. (1) Guicciardini, F., Le lettere, P. JODOGNE (ed.), Rome, Istituto Storico Italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1986-2007, 10 vol.

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