Machiavelli's MedicalMandragola: Knowledge, Food, and Feces

Abstract

This article argues that the medical discourse of Machiavelli's “Mandragola” is profoundly important both for understanding the play and for revisiting its author's philosophical and political writings. I show that discussions in “Mandragola” of doctors, medicine, eating, and elimination ultimately break down the traditional paradigm that opposes truth, nourishment, and healing to deception, problematic food, and illness. The play's extended discourse around medicine undermines the ideal of the physician who heals the state and the pharmakon of words that heal the soul (in Plato, Livy, Saint Augustine, and Machiavelli's “Discorsi”), questioning in turn notions of knowledge and truth.

Machiavelli and the Play-Element in Political Life

“…8 I am also not saying that Machiavelli’s professed misery should be disregarded. Instead, I am arguing that Machiavelli’s rhetoric in the letter is itself playful, that even his self-pity is less about his “impotent despair that the author’s political knowledge is wasted” and more of a dramatic flair, an invitation into the minor absurdities of his daily life (Gaylard 2021, 66).…”

“…But it remains unclear why class conflict would be a positive good, at least in some circumstances, as opposed to merely unavoidable, why Machiavelli might prefer a state constituted by struggles between the rich and the poor to one where the social classes lived in harmony. Why would class conflict be essential to the health of the republic (Gaylard 2021)? What could be its benefits, beyond those gained or lost by the rich and poor?…”