Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book tells the material and intellectual history of several translations of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War during the period from the production in manuscript (1452) and print (1483) of Lorenzo Valla’s first Latin rendering to the publication of Thomas Hobbes’s English version in 1629. It will examine the changes that Valla’s manuscript translation underwent as it passed through the hands of several editors and publishers who rendered it into print, and the uses to which Thucydides was put by the producers and readers of a series of vernacular versions in French (Claude de Seyssel, 1527), Italian (Francesco Strozzi 1545), English (Thomas Nicholls, 1550), and Spanish (Diego Gracián, 1564), concluding with an approach to the debut in print of one the most relevant political philosophers of modernity, Thomas Hobbes’s Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre. It traces the circulation of Thucydides’ influential text throughout different formats and linguistic communities thanks to the agency of patrons, translators, editors, and printers. As it does so, it proves the extent to which the semiotic and material history of a text conditions its reception and status.</jats:p>