What this is
A free, openly licensed, bilingual edition of Guicciardini's 39 Considerazioni and the
Discorsi chapters they answer — 78 text units, Italian and English facing, every reading
traceable to a named public-domain witness.
It is a reading edition with a transparent apparatus, not a text of record. It does not adjudicate
the critical text against Bausi 2001 or the manuscript tradition, and does not claim to.
On the title
Machiavelli had been dead two years when Guicciardini wrote; the Discorsi were unpublished,
and the Considerazioni stayed unprinted until 1857. Machiavelli never answers.
“Conversation” is a quotation, not a description. It invokes Machiavelli's letter to Vettori of
10 December 1513, where he changes into court dress at evening, enters the antique courts of ancient
men, and reports that they, in their humanity, answer me. Guicciardini does to Machiavelli
what Machiavelli did to Livy — and is denied the reply Machiavelli claimed.
Method
No image-derived reading enters the text on a single reading. Each unit is transcribed twice,
independently, by readers who have not seen each other's work; disagreements are adjudicated against
the page images and recorded.
Existing English translations of the Considerazioni — Grayson (1965), Atkinson & Sices
(2002) — are never used as translation inputs.
Licence
The established Italian text and the apparatus data are dedicated to the public domain under
CC0 1.0. They are Machiavelli's and
Guicciardini's sentences, and this edition adds no condition to them.
The English translation, the notes and the editorial apparatus are licensed
CC BY 4.0: reuse them anywhere, including
commercially, with attribution to David McDougall and this edition. The build tooling is MIT.
The witness scans are other people's digitisations, included as evidence under their own terms; no
grant is made over them, and no page image of Palmarocchi 1933 is reproduced here. Full terms,
layer by layer, are in the LICENSE file in the repository.
Version 0.3 · 20 of 39 pairs published.
This edition is versioned, not frozen. Publish, be wrong, fix it, publish again, and date every page.