Machiavelli's ambiguous treatment of religion has fueled a contentios and long-standing debate among scholars. Whereas some insist that Machiavelli is a Christian, others maintain he is a pagan. Sullivan mediates between these divergent views by arguing that he is neither but that he utilizes elements of both understandings arrayed in a wholly new way. She develops her argument by distinguishing among the three Romes that can be understood as existing in Machiavelli's political thought: the first is the Rome of the (...) Christian era, dominated by the pope; the second is the republican Rome of pagan times, which Machiavelli praises; and the third is an idealized Rome that is neither entirely pagan nor entirely Christian. Sullivan draws primarily from the Florentine Histories, The Prince, and the Discourses to offer a unique study of Machiavelli's political thought. Her examination of Machiavelli's three Romes will engage readers concerned with political thought, philosophy of the state, and Machiavelli. (shrink)

This article illustrates the main theoretical and practical problem of the study of the anagram in poetry, the still unknown entity of the anagrammatic combination, which requires specific software in order to perform a structural analysis of the text. This difficulty explains the failure of Saussure’s original hypotheses and the gradual decline, following the rediscovery of his work, of the interest of researchers in this subject. However, some poems (by Blake, Moore, Mallarmé, Valéry, Apollinaire, and Leopardi) illustrate the enormous potential (...) of the anagram for the structural analysis of poetic texts: the study of formal structure, of semantic-thematic nuclei and of metaphor, together with the main criteria for examining, with some simplification, the anagrammatic combination. An explanation is also offered for anagrammatic and grammatical-syntactic cooperation, involving the current theory of the lemma. At the time of the generation of a poetic text, the anagram acts as an associative intermediary between the combinatory matrix of the signifieds and the combinatory matrix of the signifiers, producing a lexical selection that gives anagrammatic coherence to the text. This associative intermediary enables us to understand the particular recursive function of semiosis in poetry that is given a distinct unity by the anagram. (shrink)