In the second half of the sixteenth century and in the first decades of the seventeenth century, the art of war became in Italy the object of a massive and multifarious number of publications. While Europe was set aflame by conflicts, treatises on the perfect captain, on military engineering, and on artillery made the technicalities of warfare largely accessible to the reading public. The authors of these works were often men of arms themselves, who shared the experience accrued on the battlefield with prospective soldiers and curious readers alike. Regrettably, much of this production is nowadays forgotten: not only are modern editions lacking, but scholarship on the topic is scant and not systematic.

Pretalli's book is thus a welcome and timely addition to scholarly literature on the subject. The author has selected a corpus of sixteen dialogues, which he has explored in full detail through a stylistic and rhetorical analysis. Pretalli highlights how the writers of military dialogues exploited the possibilities offered by the genre of didactic dialogue to expound the art of war. Pretalli shows that their authors sought, to different degrees, a balance between the “hard” technical matter and a certain piacevolezza (pleasantry). This balance was obtained using stylistic and rhetorical tools, as well as through structural interventions, such as inserting narrative digressions to keep the reader's attention, varying the rhythm of the dialogue, adding speeches in praise of a person or of a nation, and recounting stratagems and inventions. It is true that, as Pretalli suggests, there were differences between works penned by professional soldiers and those authored by writers with humanistic backgrounds. In the first type, for example, one finds a general contempt of excessive rhetorical ornamentation, on the assumption that res are more important than verba. Yet it is indisputable that all of these works show a certain degree of literary character: in this, they partake in a larger attempt to promote technical literature to the loftier level of courtly culture and the liberal arts. These texts, however, often retained many of their ties with didactic literature, an issue the author details in an interesting section of the book that explores the influence of abacus books on military treatises. Both of these kinds of texts posed practical problems that needed to be addressed empirically, thus moving away from the attempt to establish universal principles.

While military dialogues share many of the rhetorical features of Renaissance dialogue, they also have their own peculiarities, such as the need for appropriate technical language. This requires a creative effort on the part of the authors, who are often missing the apt words to describe the recent developments in warfare. The didactic purposes of the dialogue benefit also from the use of images, which entertain complex relations with the written text: this is the subject of one of the most interesting chapters, enriched by numerous illustrations. From Pretalli's book, writers de re militari emerge as talented intellectuals, able to match their first-hand experience on the battlefield with erudition and rhetorical skills. In some cases, such display of humanistic culture may permeate the main body of the text, while in others it may be confined to the paratextual sections. As Pretalli remarks, writing such refined works was often a means for authors to promote their own social advancement and to obtain benefices.

While one may argue that not all the rhetorical and argumentative strategies discussed in this book are particular to military dialogues (as the author himself notes), for each of them readers will find rich and accurately translated examples. Readers, moreover, may feel the need for a more systematic social and historical contextualization, addressing, for example, the extent to which the military profession was connected to social mobility, or how the development of professional figures affected the idea of nobility. To be fair, these questions lie beyond and outside the scope of this book (although readers may find hints of them in more than one place). This volume successfully engages with and illuminates an understudied set of works and makes a valuable contribution to the reassessment of literature in the second half of the sixteenth century, when new works and new genres successfully rejuvenated Italian culture.