The Rules of Military Science: Syntax and Textuality in Machiavelli’s "Art of War"

Abstract

While Machiavelli’s major works have long attracted linguistic and stylistics analysis, the Art of War has remained relatively overlooked in this regard until the early 2000s. Yet the military dialogue proves highly relevant from both a lexical and syntactic perspective, not least because it is likely the only one of Machiavelli’s works that he composed with publication explicitly in mind. Building on recent studies that have reassessed the importance of this text, the present article offers a detailed analysis of its syntactic and textual organization. It subsequently focuses on a specific term in the dialogue – regole (‘rules’) – which is closely tied to formal concerns. The investigation aims to highlight the linguistic features that make the Art of War the culmination of Machiavelli’s reflection on language, which arises from the direct impact of the political and military upheavals experienced by Florence and Italy after 1494, and which entails a constant interrelation between formal structures, thematical content, and the work’s
general objectives.