ABSTRACT
Hanna Pitkin, in her book on gender and politics in the thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, states that ‘[f]rom the beginning of Christianity, woman was not merely Eve the corruptress but also Mary, the mother of God’s only begotten son’ (Pitkin 1984: 201). In Pitkin’s analysis of the symbolic representation of women in Machiavelli’s work, the picture that emerges is one in which ‘corruption consists in a falling away from virtù and is generally the work of feminine powers’ (1984: 242).
