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The first complete English translation of a controversial Renaissance debate centering moral questions on power and leadership.Poggio Bracciolini was a prominent scholar-official of the early Renaissance and a leading representative of Florentine humanism. He was employed as a secretary to seven popes and ended his career as Chancellor of the Republic of Florence. On Leaders and Tyrants contains texts, the majority by Poggio, relating to a controversy on the relative merits of the lives and deeds of Scipio Africanus and Julius Caesar. The debate addressed the nature of tyranny and military glory, as well as the qualities necessary for republican leaders, such as Stoic virtue, lawfulness, and good citizenship. Poggio’s primary opponent was the educator Guarino of Verona, a humanist in the service of the duke of Ferrara. The psychology of power, the demands placed on public servants, and the dividing line between leadership and tyranny are as topical today as they were when Poggio wrote. This volume contains a fresh edition of the Latin texts and the first complete translation of the controversy into English.

Evil Lords uses the prism of bad rule or tyranny to enhance our understanding of political discourse from the ancient world to the Renaissance, elucidating premodern notions of sovereignty as well as the relation between ethics and politics, the individual and society, power, and propaganda. Eleven chapters present case studies exploring Hebrew, Graeco-Roman, Byzantine, early, high and late medieval, and Renaissance conceptions and representations of bad or tyrannical government. Since bad rule is always a perversion of the norm, its shifting conceptualizations shed light on historically specific assessments of what constitutes acceptable and legitimate political behavior. Meanwhile, political debate also reflects specific power structures, authorial intent, and audience expectations. Each of the essays, therefore, examines bad rule and its agents within the ideological frameworks and societal patterns of the respective periods, thereby painting a picture of historical and intellectual change. Despite these often profound variations, however, the volume also shows that it is meaningful to think of a Western tradition of tyranny in the premodern world that derived from shared roots in Classical and biblical thought and was further defined by ongoing cross-fertilization spanning two millennia. Thus, Evil Lords offers scholars and students of Western political theory, history, and literature a critical framework through which to revisit the longue durée of premodern political reflection.

Evil Lords uses the prism of bad rule or tyranny to enhance our undestranding of political discourse from the ancient world to the renaissance, offering insights into pre-modern conceptions of sovereignty, as well as into the relation between ethics and politics, the individual and society, and power and propaganda. The volume brings together case studies from 12 top scholars, each examining various aspects of Hebrew, Graeco-Roman, Byzantine, medieval, and Renaissance conceptions and representations of tyrannical government. The book's chapters also examine notions of bad rule within the ideological frameworks and societal patterns of the respective periods, thus painting a picture of historical and intellectual change. This chronological and geographical span creates a narrative of the Western tradition on tyranny from its ancient roots up to its radical revision at the brink of modernity. Tracing this current, the book also shows how tributary developments indigenous to Republican Rome, the Germanic North, and Byzantium fed, and altered, the course of tyranny.