This book marks an important turn in the study of the Neapolitan Angevins, for its focus on Angevin influence on Siena and the North reverses a decades-long historiography that viewed cultural developments in the Regno of Naples as appendages first of France and then of Tuscany and Northern Italy. Here, instead, Norman immerses us immediately into Trecento Siena and its close participation in the Guelph affinity led by King Robert of Anjou. This included political and diplomatic alliance, financial and military aid, and close cultural and intellectual connections.

Tuscans like Petrarch and Boccaccio, Giotto, Simone Martini, and Tino di Camaino either spent long periods in Naples or completed important commissions on behalf of its Angevin dynasty. Less known, however, is the impact of the Angevins themselves on Sienese—and broader Tuscan—politics and cultural life. Its documenting of this reverse influence makes Norman's book required reading. While not the first to note this turn, Norman has newly recognized the impact of Naples's Angevins on those most important visual statements of civic values in the century: Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Allegories of Good and Bad Government and Simone Martini's Maestà, in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. Norman also demonstrates how the Angevin cult of Saint Louis of Toulouse sealed the Guelph alliance throughout Italy and into southern France. The Neapolitans’ careful attention to audience and reception, Norman argues, helped shape civic identities throughout the peninsula and beyond.

Norman divides her study into three parts. Part 1, on Siena and the Angevins (21–68), traces Neapolitan political ties to Siena as it shifted from imperial Ghibelline to papal Guelph. The Angevins made Siena a focus of personal diplomacy from the 1270s on. Robert and Sancia of Naples first visited Siena in 1310 and strengthened their presence throughout their reigns largely via Robert's brothers and agents. Norman carefully demonstrates these Angevin royals’ role in maintaining the Guelph alliance throughout the peninsula, leading up to her analysis of Siena's Nine, whose close ties to King Robert's political agendas influenced Lorenzetti's and Martini's visual programs. While Norman finds no portraits and few visual traces of royal Angevins in Siena to match those in San Gimignano, Florence, Prato, or Piacenza, her detailed readings of Sienese frescoes’ heraldry and political themes argue the strong plausibility of these influences.

Part 2, on the court of Naples (71–126), follows more familiar ground in tracing the projects of Simone Martini, Lando di Pietro, and Tino da Camaino for the Angevins in Naples itself, in painting, architecture, and royal tombs. Norman is an expert in the vast European secondary literature and also judiciously builds on a growing corpus of anglophone studies on Naples and the Angevins. Gardner, Bruzelius, Kelly, Elliott and Warr, Fleck, Kozlowski, and others have now provided a solid basis for continued research into the Neapolitan Trecento.

Part 3, on the cult of Saint Louis of Toulouse and the Angevin beata stirps, meticulously reassesses Simone Martini's Saint Louis of Toulouse altarpiece for Naples's cathedral and its parallels in Assisi (S. Francesco), Florence (S. Croce), and Siena (S. Francesco), masterfully arguing for their origins in the ruling agendas of both Neapolitan and Hungarian Angevins. Norman's conclusion follows these trends into the reign of Giovanna I.

This well-produced volume is richly illustrated in color and black-and-white images of manuscripts, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Many of these will be familiar to students of the Trecento—some only to students of Trecento Naples. Several have been newly and perceptively reinterpreted by Norman. One of the delights of Norman's book is her close rereading of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Louis of Toulouse fresco in S. Francesco, Siena, which she dates to the 1340s (cover, 192, 209–17). In Lorenzetti's historical ricordanza, young Robert of Anjou and his younger brothers attend their father, Charles II, who watches pensively as his eldest son and heir, Louis of Toulouse, takes his Franciscan vows before Boniface VIII. Sanctity and devotion foreground family ties, personal ambition, and dynastic anxiety. Here and throughout this volume Norman makes Angevin high politics come alive through the faces and gestures of Sienese art. Her study will become a touchstone in the ongoing reassessment of Naples's place in Trecento Italy.