ABSTRACT
Hanna Pitkin, in her book on gender and polit ics in the thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, states that ‘[f ]rom the begin ning of Christianity, woman was not merely Eve the corruptress but also Mary, the mother of God’s only begot ten son’ (Pitkin 1984: 201). In Pitkin’s analysis of the symbolic repres ent a tion of women in Machiavelli’s work, the picture that emerges is one in which ‘corrup tion consists in a falling away from virtù and is gener ally the work of femin ine powers’ (1984: 242).
