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Reviewed by:
  • Italy and the European Powers: The Impact of War, 1500-1530
  • Victoria M. Morse
Christine Shaw , ed. Italy and the European Powers: The Impact of War, 1500-1530. History of Warfare 38. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006. xxx + 318 pp. index. illus. tbls. $142. ISBN: 90-04-15163-X.

The Italian wars and contemporary rulers have been the subject of a good deal of recent study. The editor of the present volume describes the field as one in which the older master narratives have been swept away, leaving, in her metaphor, a building the "basic plan and structure" of which "are not yet agreed" (viii). Shaw describes the goal of the present volume as the "assessment . . . of how the experience of war and its aftermath . . . affected the Italian states and the cultural life of Italy, and affected the European powers as well" (ix), a goal which is amply fulfilled in the range of topics and issues covered by the essays.

In an initial section on warfare, articles by Michael Mallett, Atis Antonovics, and Simon Pepper explore the costs of war in a period of transition to much larger and more permanent armies and the limitations of artillery in terms of transport issues, cost of innovation, and the rapid adaptation of fortification. Eva Renzulli points to the symbolic importance for the papacy of defending the House of Mary at Loreto, understood as a piece of the Holy Land that had strayed into Italy from Ottoman raiders at a time when the prospect of reconquering Jerusalem seemed dim.

John Law and Christine Shaw explore alterations in local and international politics by examining, respectively, the declining fortunes of a small duchy in the Papal States and the changing attitudes of the European powers toward the popes as territorial rulers. Turning to political theory, H. C. Butters examines relationship of structure, fortune, and human agency in the political thought of Machiavelli and Guicciardini.

In three very different studies of cities and regions under foreign rule, David Abulafia situates Ferdinand the Catholic's conquest of Naples in the context of longer-term Aragonese interests and priorities, while Letitizia Arcangeli examines what citizenship meant under the various regimes that governed Milan. George L. Gorse analyzes the descriptions of French royal entries into Genoa to assess the impact of foreign rule on the city. [End Page 518]

The final four essays address the cultural implications of the wars. John M. Najemy traces the ambivalent attitude toward the humanist claim that the study of letters fostered the art of war in the Courtier and Orlando furioso. Nicole Hochner discusses the transformation of the French literary view of Italy from terrestrial paradise to battlefield and argues that this negative view of Italy slowed the adoption of Italian Renaissance style in Louis XII's France. William Prizer shows how the study of music ceased to be seen as appropriate for elite women as it became increasingly part of the recognized skill-set of courtesans, while Ian Fenlon describes the effects of war on music publishing and composition. In the concluding essay, Jonathan Davies examines the differing effects of the wars on universities in various regions.

The authors of this diverse collection of essays offer a wide range of methodological approaches to an important topic. Among them, they represent the points of view and experiences of both the Italian players and the other European powers and successfully demonstrate that the conquered and the conquering forces were equally, though differently, influenced by the experience of the wars. Writing for a specialist audience, the authors do not equally problematize the relationship of their topics to the larger theme of the effect of the Italian wars. In several of the essays the problem of causation remains open, and the reader wonders to what extent the phenomena they describe are due to the wars and to what extent merely contemporaneous. The illustrations to Gorse's article are ample and nicely produced, but the volume would certainly benefit from a map and it seems a pity that in a collection so clearly designed for a specialist readership the publisher apparently kept the notes to a minimum. Nevertheless, the essays in this thought-provoking collection...

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