On 13 February 1503, thirteen Italian knights met thirteen French knights in the Apulian countryside in a tournament later called the Disfida di Barletta. The tournament, taking place during the height of the Italian Wars that engulfed the peninsula, ended in the defeat of the overconfident French knights. This collection of essays, edited by Fulvio Delle Donne and Victor Rivera Magos, explores the social and cultural impact of the Disfida on the Kingdom of Naples and especially its historical memory in the consciousness of Neapolitan elite in the early modern era. Eschewing nationalistic readings of Disfida, so common in the nineteenth century and Fascist era, the eleven essays in this collection place the Disfida in the larger context of Mediterranean history and in the milieu of a European-wide culture of chivalry, which pervaded the ethos of the Italian elite. Moreover, many of the essays in this volume argue for the Disfida's symbolic role in the transition in Naples from Aragonese rule to Spanish governance under the viceroyalty. And symbolic is the key term here since several of the authors, while demonstrating political and governmental continuity in this transition, argue that a deep-rooted nostalgia for Aragonese regno permeated the historical memory of the Neapolitan nobility throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The majority of the essays focus on the historical memory of the Disfida, using a wide variety of contemporary chronicles, histories, and collections of poems—the most cited in the volume being the collection of Latin and Italian poems celebrating the event, the Successo de lo combattimento delli tredici italiani e tredici francesi, first published in 1547 and reprinted in 1633. The essays provide a variety of historical perspectives that range from Peter Savy's study of French chroniclers who intentionally downplayed the Disfida and the loss of national pride at the hands of the Italians to Francesco Storti's examination of the ethos of honor, valor, and military prowess among Italian mercenaries in the Italian Wars. Taken as a whole, the volume demonstrates how a unique culture of chivalry and humanism, rooted in both rural and urban values, permeated the mentality of Neapolitan elites despite the challenges wrought by the Italian Wars and the advent of new military technologies.

Examining Neapolitan institutions, both Giovanni Muto and Francesco Senatore argue that the bureaucratic structures and governmental elite, despite the introduction of viceroys under Spanish rule, displayed a remarkable degree of continuity with the Aragonese past. The ruling elite remained virtually intact, with the Spanish leaving power in the hands of local barons and their clients. Muto, furthermore, pushes back against the Black Legend of Spanish rule in Naples, showing that a number of Spanish introductions in the south, such as the viceroyalty and the Inquisition, were not as disruptive as scholars have previously maintained and that, when compared to other European regimes, they were not necessarily any more despotic or cruel. While informative, these essays, although addressing the volume's interest in regime change, only tangentially make connections to the impact of the Disfida on Neapolitan history.

This collection provides a useful introduction to the Disfida di Barletta from a variety of perspectives and should also stimulate discussion about social and cultural change in Naple's transition from Aragonese to Spanish rule and the historical memory of these changes. Moreover, each of the essays argues for the central role of the Disfida in the cultural memory of elites in the Kingdom of Naples. As Delle Donne argues in his introductory essay, the Disfida “is a microcosm . . . the mise en abyme at the center of the extraordinary transformation between the two periods” (13).