The standard work remains Roberto Ridolfi,

The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli,

trans. Cecil Grayson (1963). Sebastian de Grazia,

Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton, 1989) is an unusual intellectual biography. John M. Najemy,

Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513-1515 (Princeton, 1993) concentrates on the period in which

The

was written. For the most up-to-date account see Maurizio Viroli,

Il sorriso de Niccolò: Storia di Machiavelli (Rome, 1998).

السياق السياسي

For the period of Machiavelli’s youth see Nicolai Rubinstein,

Unknown page