This volume consists of eight essays published in French between 1975 and 1998 and now gathered together for the first time in an English translation. Arranged chronologically rather than in the order in which the author wrote them, they show how much we owe to Michel Plaisance's path-breaking work on how to read festive language and performance in this period. He himself identifies the three aspects of this work as “research on theatre and performing arts,” “research on cultural life and institutions,” and “research on Italian literature of the Renaissance” (9). Drawing on unpublished chronicles as well as on literary texts, these differing approaches have together created a new understanding of the “double-entendre,” or “the two registers,” of popular language and the political seriousness of the apparently light-hearted carnivals of the time, as well as the doublespeak encouraged by censorship by the end of the sixteenth century.

This double language is best illustrated by the opening essay on Medici carnivals, which uses the work of Jean Toscan (in Le carnaval du language) to illustrate the sexual ambiguity of Lorenzo il Magnifico's canzoni a ballo and the complex way in which these songs developed in later Medicean masquerades. In describing the role of religious and festive confraternities in Medicean and Savonarolan Florence, as well as the part played in festivities by plebeian potenze as mock kingdoms, it provides a useful introduction to many of the themes of later chapters, especially chapters 3 and 4 on carnivals in the time of Savonarola and his role as director of the 1496 Palm Sunday Procession, and chapter 5 on Cosimo I's cultural policy (with transcriptions and translations of relevant excerpts from the Cronaca fiorentina and an anonymous letter in its appendix). Its account of Charles VIII's entry into Florence in November 1494 in chapter 2 is enriched by its account of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici's L'Invenzione della Croce, while in the remaining chapters literature is used to throw light on other aspects of society, Florentine short stories on “Madness as an Identifier and a Means of Exclusion,” and on “The Relationship between City and Country” (in chapters 7 and 8), and the fate of Antonfrancesco Grazzini's satirical writings in the face of the attempts of papal censorship to eradicate its two-level discourse (chapter 6): a fascinating account of the three-cornered struggle between the papal Inquisitor, the archbishop, and the Duke of Florence to control censorship in the course of the sixteenth century, showing how paradoxically the cache of sequestered writings in the Archiepiscopal Archive in Florence has “freed his captive voice” by preserving his original version.

A measure of the pioneering success of these chapters is the extent to which many of them have been superceded by more recent work in the field — especially by Konrad Eisenbichler's work on confraternities and his edited volume on The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici (2001), by Nicole Carew-Reid's Les Fêtes Florentines au temps de Lorenzo il Magnifico (1995), by Giovanni Ciappelli's Carnevale e Quaresima (1997), by Michael Rocke's Forbidden Friendships (1996), and by the ongoing work of David Rosenthal on plebeian potenze in a series of articles — such as “The Spaces of Plebeian Ritual and the Boundaries of Transgression” (in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, ed. R. Crumb and J. Paoletti, 2006) — that carry Plaisance's intuition about their importance into quite new territory. Nevertheless, this book remains essential reading, not only as an introduction to the subject (in English and brought up to date with revised footnotes), but because of its great skill (in the best French mentalité tradition) in integrating the languages of politics, literature, and the theater in this period. One of the pleasures — and privileges — of reading it is to follow its clear intellectual trajectory as it cuts through the changing layers of social practices and political events to offer a convincing overall, but nuanced, interpretation of these transitional years.