Today Machiavelli is known almost exclusively as a political thinker, but to his contemporaries he was also an expert on herbs and poisons. Though his medicinal writings no longer exist, Machiavelli is cited twice in 16th-century manuals as an expert on spider poison. Likely, he would have been extremely familiar with the early modern…
Author: Angelica Modabber
Angelica is a PhD candidate in the Italian and Comparative Literature departments at Columbia University. She received her BA in English from Barnard College and her research focuses on the history of science and religion in the 17th century.