Communication and Conflict

Renaissance Italy has long been at the heart of studies of early modern diplomacy, not least because of Garrett Mattingly’s argument that resident diplomacy was born there in the mid-fifteenth century, before expanding north of the Alps with the advent of the Italian Wars in 1494. The two volumes reviewed here offer an alternative view of how Italian diplomacy developed across the fifteenth century, building upon work by scholars, such as Daniela Frigo, who have challenged Mattingly’s attractively straightforward model. Both books are also influenced by the recent trend in diplomatic history to see diplomatic interactions as social and cultural processes. The chronologies that the two authors tackle are overlapping, but subtly different: Lazzarini discusses a ‘long’ fifteenth century that stretches back into the late fourteenth century and up to 1520 (although most of the discussion stays firmly in the fifteenth century), whereas Fletcher concentrates on the period between the mid-fifteenth century and the late 1520s. Similarly, there is some overlap in the geographical focus of the two volumes: the diplomatic community in Rome is the locus of Fletcher’s study, while Lazzarini addresses the diplomacy of various Italian powers across the peninsula

Ancient history · Argument (complex analysis · Art history · Diplomacy · Fifteenth · Italian Renaissance · Political science · Politics · The Renaissance · Classics · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies