Diplomats at work: three Renaissance studies (review)

200 Short notices Russell, Joycelyne G., Diplomats at work: three Renaissance studies, Stroud & Wolfeboro Falls, Alan Sutton, 1992, cloth; pp. xvii, 190, 6 plates; R.R.P. £28.00/US$62.00. These three essays come to us from an historian who as the author of The Field of the Cloth of Gold and Peacemaking in the Renaissance has played an important role in charting the intricacies of sixteenth-century European diplomacy. T w o of the present essays explore great diplomatic set-pieces of the Renaissance: the Congress of Mantua of 1457 and the Peace of Cambrai of 1529. At Mantua, Pope Pius II deployed his not inconsiderable eloquence to persuade the princes of Europe to undertake a Crusade for the liberation of Constantinople from the Turks. His words were met with the rhetoric of vague promises and evasion. Crusading zeal was confined to those on the frontier whose own borders were threatened. At Cambrai, Margaret of Austria, aunt of the Emperor Charles V, and Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis I, King of France, negotiated yet another Franco-Imperial peace with a dedication and determination well beyond that desired by their male relatives. Russell highlights the role of w o m e n as peacemakers, but with not so much as a side glance at strategies, methods, and concepts emanating from women's history. These essays are indeed very much works of old-fashioned diplomatic history; scholarly, grounded in archival sources, committed to uncovering the detail, the interaction of the intentional and the accidental. The impression of a voice from another world is no more evident than in the first essay which takes as its theme the fashionable subject of communication, the discourses of diplomacy. In this essay, Russell looks at conversation across borders, the media by which the elites of Europe talked to each other. Her focus is on the language expertise in Latin and foreign vernaculars at the various Courts of Europe. But she goes little beyond trying to ascertain the extent of knowledge, an exercise which can yield only partial and impressionistic results. Nevertheless, this essay does highlight the language and languages of Renaissance diplomacy as a potentially fascinating andrichsubject. Roslyn Pesman Department of History University of Sydney ...