For over a decade, Ada Palmer, a history professor at University of Chicago (and a science-fiction writer!), struggled to teach Machiavelli. “I kept changing my approach, trying new things: which texts, what combinations, expanding how many class sessions he got…” The problem, she explains, is that “Machiavelli doesn’t unpack his contemporary examples, he assumes that you lived through it and know, so sometimes he just says things like: Some princes don’t have to work to maintain their power, like the Duke of Ferrara, period end of chapter. He doesn’t explain, so modern readers can’t get it.”

Palmer's solution was to make her students live through the run-up to the Italian Wars themselves. Her current method involves a three-week simulation of the 1492 papal election, a massive undertaking with sixty students playing historical figures, each receiving over twenty pages of unique character material, supported by twenty chroniclers and seventy volunteers. After this almost month-long pedagogical marathon, a week of analysis, and reading Machiavelli's letters, students finally encounter The Prince. By then they know the context intimately. When Machiavelli mentions the Duke of Ferrara maintaining power effortlessly, Palmer's students react viscerally. They remember Alfonso and Ippolito d’Este as [...]

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