This is a remarkable book that gives new and important insights into the nature of mass violence during the Italian Wars. It shows how deeply the experience of sack and massacre shaped Italians’ perceptions of the sixteenth century. It draws on a wide variety of archival, chronicle, diplomatic, and literary sources in several languages. Renaissance Mass Murder began as a chapter in Dean and Lowe's Murder in the Italian Renaissance (2017), and the subject is fit fodder for a full monograph's treatment.

Bowd makes two primary arguments: that the mass murder of civilians during sieges and battles was a considered and justifiable strategy of warfare according to both theorists and practitioners of war, and that the survivors and observers of this violence struggled to place it into a coherent framework of literary or historical culture to make some meaning of it. Deeply engaging, and significant to our view of the period, Bowd's multidisciplinary work is essential reading for all students and researchers of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in Italy.

Renaissance Mass Murder is divided into four parts of two chapters apiece. A brief introduction discusses Bowd's sources and their limitations, primarily that actual numbers from sacks and massacres are difficult to come by and unreliable when found, and reviews some of the current literature on the history and theory of violence germane to the subject here. Of particular concern to Bowd is the ongoing debate over whether violence is something “hydraulic” and unrestrained or something more considered and strategic. The first numbered chapter provides a concise and highly readable overview of the Italian Wars, divided into four periods.

Part 2 analyzes the available evidence for the incidence and character of sacks and massacres during the Italian Wars. Chapter 2 reviews the why of mass murder: as a strategy of terror, as a tactic of negotiation, as revenge and punishment for perfidy in war, for plunder. This chapter also shows how sacks and massacres had a distinct ethnic and national component: Italian Jews suffered at the hands of their own cohabitants and were also liable to violence by conquering armies. Chapter 3 focuses on the experience of civilians, showing how the preparation for siege, defense of a city, and resistance to occupation could blur the lines between civilian and soldier, and between men and women, in the eyes of a sacking horde. In these chapters the focus is on the considered use of mass violence by commanders to achieve certain aims, and the consequences of that violence for those committing it and those suffering it.

Part 3 moves to Renaissance martial theory and the role of civilians in Augustinian, chivalric, and humanist philosophies of war. Chapter 4 shows that in all these modes of thought, the laws of war left room for significant violence against civilians even when laying out conditions under which they should be protected. Nowhere was there formulated a general immunity of civilians to wartime violence. Chapter 5 is devoted to the works of Machiavelli, upon which many Renaissance theorists drew: Machiavelli, characteristically, had a clear-eyed view of the place of civilians in war and how violence against them could function to the benefit or detriment of invading armies.

The last part turns to the memory of mass murder, and its representation in art and literature. Working within traditional artistic and literary cultures, Italian and other European artists and writers attempted to create some sense from the experience of mass violence at the hands of soldiers. Writers struggled with the why of this violence: was it divine punishment for the lassitude of a people in decline? Was it a sign of the weakness of the Italian political class at a moment of crisis? Were the victims to be made martyrs?

All told, Bowd sensitively argues that the experience of mass violence in the Italian Wars challenges the notion that such violence was exceptional: rather, it was the rule of war, seen in the long view of European history. Structural elements of martial organization made it both a necessary and desirable form of warfare. Bowd brings us this important argument with fine prose and a deep compassion for the women, children, and men who suffered from Renaissance mass murder.