ABSTRACT
As long ago as 1939, Felix Gilbert demonstrated the usefulness of a textual analysis of the moral-political discourse of the Renaissance. He argued that a fundamental political reorientation can be diagnosed in the alterations in the genre of advice or counsel, for example, in reading Machiavelli’s Prince as a transformation of medieval and humanist “Mirrors for Princes.” A major focus of modern scholarship on the Ricordi has been the definitive establishment of the texts of the five successive redactions of the maxims. Here Guicciardini recognises economy as formal value. And certainly it is the case that any account of the proverbial form must stipulate the criterion of economy. In the proverb, a skeletal prose purveys skeletal premises; it is a severe statement of guarded expectations of human behavior. But if a primary attribute of the proverbial form is economy, a primary value of a collection of proverbs is richness.
