This volume of 14 essays makes a valuable contribution to three related academic fields: history of feminist thought, history of political thought in North America, and the general history of political thought. In her Introduction, editor Maria Falco has done an excellent job of bringing her readers up to date on the evolving state of the feminist critiques of Machiavelli.

Machiavelli had raised (and continues to raise) a number of serious issues: the role of virtu or human agency in political “founding” and political “innovation” (the problem of the new prince); in the maintenance of liberty through laws, education, and the satisfactions of the humors; in the necessity of expansion through empire; in the primacy of the ethic of the ends over that of the means; and in the rejection of any reference to the transcendental destiny of humans. The case for human agency was made against the background of an outdated Ptolemaic cosmology, according to which the natural motions of the planets were thought to exert not only physical but also moral influence on individuals, states, religions, and history. In this universe, regulated by uniform laws, unforeseen chance events also occurred. This latter phenomenon, treated in philosophy as “chance” or tyche, was treated by Machiavelli as if it were produced by the personified figure of fortuna, considered alternatively as a woman and a goddess (dea). The exercise of human agency in such a cosmos appeared to him to involve a struggle with naturalistic contingency.

How the treatment of these grave issues was affected by Machiavelli's obvious gender bias is the large question that this volume addresses. Did the bias affect the substance of this thought or only its mode of articulation?

Feminist opinion is divided—as these essays amply testify. Its focus is mostly on the woman metaphor of The Prince 25, on the image of the citizen-soldier, on the evaluation of historical figures such as Queen Giovanna of Naples and Caterina Sforza of Forli, on fictional characters such as Lucrezia and Sofronia, and on the portrait drawn of fortuna as a dea, as in Discourses II.1 and Machiavelli's minor poems.

The divisions within the feminist school follow roughly the following lines. Jean Bethke Elshtain started the discussion in 1981 when she spoke of the war of the sexes. In 1984, Hannah Pitkin carried it further. Arlene Saxonhouse, demurring, took a different line, arguing that there was plenty of gender bending in Machiavelli and that, given certain cultural conditions, women could turn out to be as good citizens as men. Machiavelli himself was uncertain about what role to assign to women in politics. Wendy Brown spoke hopefully of a postmasculine future for politics. Catherine Zuckert painted a different picture of his women characters than did Melissa Matthes. On the question of citizen-soldier, R. Claire Snyder argued that educazione was likely to be more relevant than gender, a point that is compatible with the position taken by Cary Nederman and Martin Morris. The latter see his theory of humors as permitting a gender-free way of settling internal political conflicts.

Vesna Marcina has made one of the creative suggestions found in this volume, namely, the need to reread Machiavelli in the light of the intellectual context of his time. Jane Jaquette has followed this up with yet another creative suggestion, namely, the need to rethink Machiavelli. We see in this volume, then, a welcome threefold progression—from complaints to the need to reread, to rethink, and to reinterpret our author—and in that order. And everyone, not just the feminists, should be grateful for this. And Andrea Nicki's explanation of Lucrezia's satisfaction with adultery (p. 377) fully justifies the need for the new approach. Whereas Machiavelli had justified it only in terms of the discredited ethic of astral determinism, Nicki justifies it in terms of Lucrezia's alleged “new moral insight.”

Nowhere is the need for the new approach more urgent than in interpreting Machiavelli on fortuna. Rereading him in context would reveal that he had based his case on a soon-to-be discarded Ptolemaic cosmology. The rereading therefore should start with works on fortuna produced in his own time. The authors would include Pico della Mirandola, Savonarola, Pontano, Nifo, Bellanti, Ficino, and Pomponazzi, among others. In the 1490s, Florence was so inundated with works on the old cosmology that Savonarola counted 12 authors by name, including Ptolemy, “the prince of these astrologers” (il principe di questi astrologi). Pico's Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, libri xii, appeared in 1496, Savonarola's Contra astrologiam divinatricem appeared in 1497, and Machiavelli was appointed Secretary in 1498. Jacob Burckhardt said of Pico's work that it made “an epoch in the subject,” and Eugenio Garin compared it to Novum Organum and Discours de la Method.

Allied to Ptolemaic cosmology was astrological medicine—both fields being endorsed in the Preface to the Discourses, the only portion of the work that has survived in Machiavelli's autograph. Galen, Galenic writings, and Albumasar are also indispensable background sources for Machiavelli studies.

When all this is taken into account, what emerges is that Machiavelli's subscription to a premodern cosmology and medicine disqualifies him from being considered the founder of modern political philosophy—a title, to his great credit, he had never claimed. One cannot be modern and at the same time explain fortuna the way he did. A negative proof of this is that no modern political philosopher has ever paid any serious attention to fortuna. The new cosmology made that unthinkable.

The new possibilities that Feminist Interpretations of Niccolo Machiavelli has opened up are challenging and rewarding. Young scholars who have the mental flexibility and the time to reread, to rethink, and to reinterpret him should take full advantage of them.