It is one of the volume’s many merits that the period treated extends well beyond the dates that appear in the subtitle. Thus Lewin gives the reader a valuable survey or “landscape” (16) of Florentine-papal diplomacy throughout the preceding century; the third chapter offers a good account of the War of the Eight Saints (1375-78); and an epilogue offers suggestions for ways of reading the history of these relations in the decades after the Council of Constance. The bulk of Lewin’s book is devoted to the period of the Great Schism, however, and she gives a clear and detailed account from the perspective of the Florentine Republic o the conflicts, the alliances, the diplomatic volte-faces, and the factional intrigues that plagued the Church, Italy, and Europe during years when first two and then three persons claimed the papacy.

The complex political narrative is constructed largely on the basis of chronicles and the contemporary minutes of political discussions within the Florentine regime known as the Consulte e pratiche. What emerges is an account of Florence that emphasizes contingency, with Florentine policy determined largely in response to a dramatic series of external threats (the War of the Eight Saints, war with Giangaleazzo Visconti and Ladislaus of Naples, the conquests of Giangaleazzo Visconti), and a number of striking opportunities (the acquisition of Arezzo, the conquest of Pisa, hosting the Council of Pisa). Lewin is particularly helpful in indicating the often-parallel diplomatic tracks taken by Florence’s republican regime in negotiating with Europe’s great powers and with multiple popes. She also demonstrates that many leading Florentines vacillated in the onions concerning the Church, so that it is difficult to assign consistently held views to many of the most frequent speakers in the Florentine debates. As Lewin writes, “There was never any one Florentine attitude toward the papacy during the fourteenth century” (33); and “the acknowledged leaders of the regime during this period…showed themselves willing to adapt their opinions and policy to changing conditions outside of Florence” (204). One of the more striking conclusions of Lewin’s study is that Florentine “Guelfism” lost almost of all of its former ideological substance by the later fourteenth century. Lewin agrees with David Peterson in seeing the War of the Eight Saints as a watershed moment, with the experience of war and interdict driving a psychological wedge between Florence and the Church that endured for generations. In the immediate aftermath of that war, Florence pursued a policy opposed to papal expansion in central Italy, but as Lewin carefully shows, by the early 1400s the Florentines were advocating the creation of a papal territorial state as a bulwark against encroachment by outsider powers. As she argues in her epilogue, the leaders of the Florentine Republic in these years seem to have been attempting to create a diplomatic situation in which peace and commercial prosperity n Italy would be guaranteed by a balance of power among a few large territorial states. The seed of the ideas embodies in the Peace of Lodi (1454) were first sown amidst the chaos of the Schism.

The absence of a strategic vision in Florentine politics ca. 1400 is possibly overemphasized – perhaps because the speakers in the Consulte e pratiche tended to offer suggestions for dealing with “practical” questions, or perhaps because the affairs of the church were so uncertain for so long a time that it little behooved anyone in Florence to have fixed ideas about them. To be sure the Florentines were interested in survival –Lewin writes that “those governing and advising Florence were firmly committed to maintaining the commune’s own borders” (32) – but clearly they managed to do much better. The acquisitions of Arezzo, Montepulciano, Pisa, and Cortona and the reduction of Pistoia from allied to subject status effectively tripled the size of the Florentine state. Other scholars have argued that elements of a new state-centered ideology reflecting this transformation may be found in the writings of contemporary jurisconsults, in Florentine projects for constitutional reform, and in the histories of humanist scholars. The role of the papacy (and of the Church of Christendom) envisaged in these projects remains to be clarified, and here Lewin has done valuable work by filling n much of the necessary background.

Although Lewin focuses of Florence, the events she treats sprawled across an entire continent. It is thus remarkable that she has been able to compass so much in a tidy, controlled volume. Occasionally there are things that Lewin misses. The papal territorial claim to Tuscany on the basis of the Matildine donation should perhaps have been touched on. And while Florence sent no official embassy to the Council of Constance, as Lewin emphasizes, it is perhaps therefore of even greater interest to know that Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici sent his son Cosimo to Constance. But these are small points that hardly diminish the significance of Lewin’s splendid new study, for which Florentine historians will long remain in her debt.