The Reading List salutes two university presses for rising above the muck of multicultural, postmodernist, and transgender studies and publishing impeccable and useful scholarly editions of important works. Fun ones, too.
The University of Chicago Press has given us a new edition of Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy. The Discourses is, along with The Prince, the founding guide to the "new modes and orders" of the modern world in which we live. It's translated with painstaking accuracy-but also great readability -- by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. There's a helpful glossary and index, and a too-short introduction, which can be supplemented, however, by Mansfield's new book of essays, Machiavelli's Virtue, also from Chicago.
A century later, one of Old Nick's lieutenants, Francis Bacon, wrote a Machiavellian account of recent English history for the instruction of his countrymen. Cornell University Press has published a scholarly edition of Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh. This now-obscure work is a good read, and the fascinating interpretative essay by the editor, Jerry Weinberger, makes clear that it is also a fundamental work in modern political thought.
Neither book may seem at first blush a candidate for summer reading -- but think how much you'll impress your beach blanket neighbors!