Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350-1520

Year 2016, Volume: 48 Issue: 48, 441 - 445, 27.07.2016

Emrah Safa Gürkan

https://doi.org/10.18589/oa.588162

Abstract

Isabella Lazzarini offers a new take on the issue of modern diplomacy’s emergence in late medieval Europe. Following the basic tenets of new diplomatic history, her account carefully scrutinizes the evolution of diplomatic interactions in Italy through what she calls the long Quattrocento. In her presentation of a multilayered and multifaceted diplomacy, she espouses a revisionist approach against the traditional historiography which sees diplomacy within the grand narrative of modern state’s emergence and places its roots firmly in the mid-fifteenth century, taking Florence as its case-study. Criticizing the established historiography’s obsession with formality, neglect of social and cultural aspects of diplomacy, and reduction of diplomatic agency to state actors and to the official ambassador, Lazzarini depicts diplomacy as a flexible political activity in which negotiation, information-gathering, representation and communication interacted in accordance with political and cultural transformation of power and authority.

Keywords

Communication, Conflict, Italian

Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350-1520

Abstract

Isabella Lazzarini offers a new take on the issue of modern diplomacy’s emergence in late medieval Europe. Following the basic tenets of new diplomatic
history, her account carefully scrutinizes the evolution of diplomatic interactions
in Italy through what she calls the long Quattrocento. In her presentation of
a multilayered and multifaceted diplomacy, she espouses a revisionist approach
against the traditional historiography which sees diplomacy within the grand narrative of modern state’s emergence and places its roots firmly in the mid-fifteenth
century, taking Florence as its case-study. 

Keywords

Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict, Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance

References

• Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350-1520 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, ix+326 pp., ISBN 978-019-8727-41-5.