In the last decades, plenty of books on the political thought of the Italian Renaissance have been published. Christine Shaw's monograph tries to deal with this widely explored subject from a slightly different and original perspective, looking not at the political theory but at the practiced governance of several Italian republics in the second half of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century. In so doing, the author highlights two concepts that were fundamental in practice, even if they did not have a particularly strong definition in Renaissance political theory—that is, experience, the leading notion for political governors who handled political affairs and grounded their actions on expertise about contemporary political matters and on evidence of the past, and reason, the ability to face political problems by finding an ad hoc solution without relying on predetermined rules.
The cases taken into account are those of the Republic of Florence, the most articulated and complex republic at the time, in which political changes were frequent thanks to the role of the Medicis; Venice, the steadiest model of republican government in early modern Europe; Genoa, exactly the opposite of Venice, governed by a system of factions that exhibited internal conflict among parties; Siena, another unstable republic; and Lucca, a small republic, almost politically isolated.
Shaw's work, founded more on primary sources than on secondary literature, is impressive for the size and quality of its archival work, which allows the author to give fresh insight on the practice of republican government. Her aim is not to explore how the political concepts established in the celebrated theoretical treatises of the time were concretely adopted, but, on the contrary, to investigate to what extent political practice stimulated new approaches to political thought and influenced the development of political theory, sometimes even in a deductive way. Still, the author usefully remarks on the fact that the governors of Italian republics were not interested in developing a systematic theory of the nature of state, but just wanted to solve concrete problems linked to the political functioning of their policies.
Chapters are devoted to key concepts of the Renaissance republican thought, such as the idea of unione, opposed to that of division into factions; the limits of the freedom of speech; participation in the government, conceived in certain cases as an honor based on merit, while in others as a duty that needed a reward; the problem of where the locus of sovereignty was in the republic and who was the supreme authority within a republican political context; and the relationship between public finance and private profits. The author's conclusions are often not very original—for instance, at the end of chapter 1, the author argues that the desirability of union, always expressed in almost every republican context, does not imply a total consequent refusal of the logic of factions—but it is appreciable that these conclusions are always supported by mentions of rich dossiers of interesting archival documents.
Another stimulating element of the monograph is the comparison between republican and monarchical policies that lays behind several chapters. Even though on the back cover it is argued that the book finally breaks the long-lasting tradition of stressing the commonalities of republican and princely regimes, stating that there were distinctive features in the practices of republican government, Shaw seems to claim quite the opposite. The author does not follow the critical path designed by the Cambridge school of intellectual history, according to which the political theory of early modern republicanism was established in opposition to the absolutist thought; in fact, Shaw proves that “republican citizens did not shy away from the vocabulary of monarchy and lordship” (82), and that they normally conceived the presence of a princely figure within their constitution.
