ABSTRACT
In 1577 the Florentine physician Paolo Mini, then resident in Lyon, took up his pen against a wave of anti-Florentine criticism. The Florentine Histories, the Discourses, and even the Art of War figured prominently for them, though some readers differed with his arguments about religion and morality. Several major works by these sixteenth-century Florentines were first published outside of Italy in the eighteenth century, both separately and as part of large collections, by editors and publishers who assumed they would find an interested audience. A number of other noted Florentine authors had joined Niccolò Machiavelli on the Index, among them Giovanni Boccaccio. Boccaccio was held in high esteem as a prose stylist, as seen above in Benedetto Varchi's reference. The efforts to rehabilitate Machiavelli's works were part of this wider interest in restoring access to the city's great writers. Even without this little work in circulation, it seems clear that Machiavelli as known by sixteenth-century Florentines had a singularly Florentine inflection.
