Situazioni d'Assedio: Cities Under Siege (review)

This lavishly produced book contains the proceedings of the conference held under the same name in Montalcino, 7-10 July 1999, supported, as becomes clear just by glancing at the acknowledgments listed in the first pages, by some powerful backers of unequivocal political leanings. Probably for this reason the volume does not just focus on the siege through history, being instead an excuse to bring together, amongst others, biologists, anthropologists, architects, urban planners, economists, sociologists, politicians and, finally, historians. This omni-comprehensive effort boils down to forty-two essays in various languages, roughly half of them in English, covering a wide range of topics. Conveniently, all the contributions are abstracted in English and Italian at the end of the book.

The articles are grouped together in five sections, dealing with: siege preparations; the points of view of the besiegers as well as of the besieged; the siege aftermath and its memory. Predictably, the various parts do not blend very well together, and also the quality of the single essays varies greatly. Many are short: Vincent Renstrom's Tables Turned: The Andean Siege of Cuzco in just four pages, endnotes included. Besides, notwithstanding the fact that a number of articles are based on archival or primary sources, for example Luigi Zangheri's on the fortification of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, not many could be described as groundbreaking in any specific way.

Most of the contributions in the first two sections ("Getting Ready to Face a Siege" and "The Siege as Experienced by the Besiegens" [sic]) cover the period leading up to the French Revolution, with only a couple dealing with post-Napoleonic topics. The majority of these essays are directed specifically to military historians, and quite a few, for example the one by Manuel-Reyes Garcia Hurtado (Le siège dans l'art militaire espagnol du XVIII siècle), make for some interesting reading. However, from the third section onwards things start to move away from military history proper, and in some cases this departure is rather too drastic. For instance, whilst James Crisp's study on the Alamo and the myth of David Crockett can be seen as fitting within the frame of siege historiography and myth, one is at pains to find some sort of placement within the structure of the book for Rocco Coronato's King John and the Siege as Hermeneutics, or for the multiauthored The Demographic Impact of the Mexican Revolution in the United States. Luckily, to redress the balance there are also, for example, the essays by Charles Carlton, dealing with sieges during the English Civil Wars, and Kristina Zarlengo, on urban warfare in Atomic Age cities of the United States.

Overall, the breadth of topics covered by the book means that it could appeal to a number of people, both for research or for teaching purposes. Also, given its size and production quality, the volume's price of just twenty-one euros makes it, despite all its defects, a very good bargain.