While the horizons of early modern Italy have opened up well past Florence, the city still casts a long shadow over even recent historiography. The complex polities of early modern Italy have invited intense study, but comparative work often remains a desideratum. The fifteen essays in this volume, the result of a series of panels organized at the 2010 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, in Venice, address this lacuna. Drawing together Anglophone and Italian scholars from a variety of institutions, the collection showcases current scholarship on the legitimation, expression, and extension of power in Italy in the fourteenth through the sixteenth century, embracing less-studied centers like Genoa, Pisa, and Savoy alongside the familiar Florence, Venice, and Milan. The resulting comparisons, dissonances, and crosscurrents make the volume a rich and varied read, presenting opportunities for further exploration.

Daniel Bornstein's introduction devotes special attention to the historiographic tendency to weigh problems and developments, in Italy as elsewhere, against their resemblance to modern solutions and institutions, as well as past scholarly attempts to locate the origins of the modern state. Invoking Giorgio Chittolini and his followers, who since the 1980s have emphasized the multivalent nature of state authority in Italy, Bornstein refrains from offering general definitions of state or power. Each essay can thus be read as a separate meditation upon these linked concepts, sensitive to the existence of diverse power sources, whether political, judicial, or sacral, and to the delicate interplay of innovation and tradition that characterized early modern Italy.

The essays appear in three sections, across which there is much overlap: the first (“Words of Power and the Power of Words”) considers written and spoken discourses of power; the second (“Picturing Power: The Articulation and Display of Civic Values”) explores expression of civic values, especially, though not exclusively, visual; and the third (“Religion, Power, and the State”) examines religious strategies to legitimize state power. While religious texts and discourses are the explicit focus of the third section, religion permeates the entire collection as one of the most potent languages of power. Thus, essays on hagiography (for example, contributions by Corinne Wieben and Cecilia Iannella) and religious iconography (Guido Cariboni and Jessamyn Conrad) emphasize how familiar narratives and images were skillfully adapted by new actors. The mendicant orders’ relationship to civic power is a particular focus of several essays. Paolo Evangelisti and Nicholas Scott Baker examine mendicants in the context of civic humanism and republicanism, and Laura Gaffuri's masterful essay provides a long view of the mendicants’ marriage of biblical exegesis with political discourse, as well as a compelling close reading of Observant sermons in fifteenth-century Turin.

Among those essays not focused on religious topics, and despite the authors’ explicit and careful rejection of traditional narratives of the “modern state,” many implicit yet instructive echoes of the modern world may be found. Outstanding examples include Carlo Taviani's stimulating essay on the Casa San Giorgio, a private corporation that took over a number of state responsibilities for the Genoese despite the chagrin of some contemporaries; Elizabeth Horodowich's close reading of Marin Sanudo's extraordinary diaries for his take on news and its authoritative sources in fractious Venice; and Federica Cengarle's fascinating examination of statute law and juridical commentaries for evolving discussions of the balance of power between dominus and populus as political fortunes shifted decisively in favor of the former in Visconti Lombardy.

Each essay is furnished with its own list of works cited, keeping footnotes succinct. In-text quotations in Latin and Italian appear in the original first, with English translation in square brackets. This lends a slightly cluttered appearance to the text, but does allow for easy comparison of translation and original. Publishing considerations may have impacted the decision to forego images for the essays that rely on visual evidence. The essays in this volume complement one another well, and the geographic distribution of the essay topics makes the volume especially useful for comparative work. Gaffuri remarks that the complexity of the Sabaudian state challenges scholars with the need for “polycentric research perspectives and an almost microhistorical level of analysis” (192). Her statement could apply to any of the states examined in this volume, which worthily meets that dual challenge.