Centenary Paper: Translation, Communication and the Circulation of Political Vocabulary in Early Modern Europe: Ceriol’s <i>El Concejo y consejeros del príncipe</i> (1559) and Filippe’s <i>Tractado del conseio y de los consejeros de los príncipes</i>

Fadrique Furió Ceriol’s El concejo y consejeros del príncipe (Antwerp, 1559) proclaimed that the counsellor must exercise self-control and restraint even in matters of religion. This is consistent with its pragmatic spirit and Ceriol’s counsel to his dedicatee, Philip II. In 1584 Bartolomeu Filippe published in Coimbra his Tractado del conseio y de los consejeros de los principes . Written in a different political climate, it appropriated the language of Machiavelli’s Discourses from Juan Lorenzo Ottevanti’s 1552 Spanish translation. Several Latin translations of Ceriol’s treatise circulated between Strasburg and Krakow. It was translated into Italian in 1560 and into English in 1570 by Thomas Blundeville, whose marginal notes turned the original into an essay in comparative political science. John Thorius translated Filippe’s Tractado into English in 1589, dedicating it to Sir John Fortescue, a privy councillor of Queen Elizabeth, and Giulio Cesare Valentino translated it into Italian in 1599. This paper uses these treatises and translations as case studies for the ways in which political vocabulary circulated around Early Modern Europe, tracing the paths they followed, the networks that provided the infrastructure for their distribution and reception and the roles played by dedicatees, publishers and printers, as well as authors and translators.