Interest in literary depictions of diplomacy has enjoyed renewed vigor in the wake of Timothy Hampton’s Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (2009). The volume currently under review includes several essays that are in dialogue with Hampton’s ideas. Hampton himself meaningfully adds to the growing body of work in this field, contributing an engaging analysis of Miguel de Cervantes’s Numancia (mid-1580s) and Pierre Corneille’s Sertorius (1662). Focusing on the representation of truce in the plays, he argues that the moments when it appears are moments when notions of morality are probed and explored. Several of the contributions focus on tragedy. Jane Newman locates the origins of German Trauerspiele in the aftermath of Westphalia. She reads Andreas Gryphius’s Catharina von Georgien (pr. 1657) as reflecting post-Westphalian anxieties, suggesting that it depicts the letter of the law and the spirit of an agreement as both posing dangers. Valeria Cimmieri also turns to tragedies—written in response to Venetian wars against the Ottomans—in her exposition of representations of failed peace and negative depictions of the Turks. Cimmieri’s four plays are fertile grounds for exploring negotiation, not least as they all feature a nuntius character who narrates military action not shown on stage. Dramatic texts are also the subject of the essays by de Carles and Patricia Akhimie. De Carles wants to argue that there were times when indirect characterization was used to identify ambassadors in drama, while Akhimie focuses on diplomacy in the broadest sense of the term in her discussion of Paulina from The Winter’s Tale. In both cases, negotiation is a strong theme, but some readers will feel that these two authors stretch the definition of ambassador too far.

The volume aims to extend the scope of analysis beyond literary representations of diplomacy to include considerations of the spaces of diplomacy, visual representations of it, and diplomats’ own textual presentation of their endeavors. Akhimie, for example, is keen to explore the meaning of the gallery as a site of negotiation. Space is also the main focus of Roberta Anderson’s description of Noël de Caron’s audiences with James VI/I. Labeling galleries and gardens as marginal spaces betrays Anderson’s lack of engagement with recent work on both diplomatic ceremonial and politicized space in early modern palaces that would see such areas as performing particular (and not necessarily marginal) functions within the spatial language of Renaissance politics. The place of visual culture within diplomatic representation is discussed by Ladan Niayesh, who argues that the sartorial politics and self-staging on display in portraits of Robert Sherley were designed to heighten his claims to represent Shah Abbas and promote the mercantile-military alliance at the heart of his embassy. Diplomatic self-presentation recurs as a theme in Dominique Goy-Blanquet’s examination of the “editorial diplomacy” (50) of sometime diplomat and author Jean Hotman’s collection of letters and prose by himself and his family members (Opuscules françoises des Hotmans), which she proposes was a “textual instrument of appeasement” (52). Meanwhile, Diego Pirillo’s illuminating study of a very different family affair adds to our understanding of those diplomatic actors below the level of ambassadors. He ably illustrates that the Ragazzoni family served as important intermediaries between England and Venice in the absence of resident ambassadors.

Overall, like many edited collections, this volume is a mixed bag. Some of the essays are important and enlightening, but others disappoint. Some will not convince all readers fully but may well spark productive disagreement. Although the volume is published in an interdisciplinary series the authors are, on the whole, more conversant with developments in literary studies of diplomacy than with the growing number of excellent historical studies of early modern diplomatic practice. This is a shame, as the theme of the volume holds much potential to bring the two approaches together, and greater engagement with the recent historical scholarship would have considerably enhanced the quality of several contributions to the volume.