Lettere, vols. 5-6.

Michael Mallett devoted some twelve years to editing the 115 Laurentian letters, covering the period 15 April 1480-26 April 1482, presented so meticulously and annotated so exhaustively in these two volumes, and the rewards for the reader are as great as the labor was arduous. The edition of Lorenzo de' Medici's letters of which these volumes are a part - making its necessarily slow but firm and stately progress under Nicolai Rubinstein's general direction - is emerging as a collaborative triumph of Italian Renaissance scholarship in our era. No student can fail to be on intimate terms with the successive volumes, whether his/her field is Florentine domestic politics or Italian warfare and diplomacy, Renaissance falconry or horse-racing. The editors manage to track the labyrinthine and often murky paths of Florentine and Italian politics and diplomacy with an authoritative sense both of direction and of the general context, while also breathing life into minor figures in the correspondence in their learned footnotes. Critics of the project who have complained of editorial "over-kill" must surely by now be silenced by what St. Bernard of Clairvaux - himself a great letter-writer - might have called "the immense usefulness, the useful immensity," of these volumes. Ten minutes with this edition can save a researcher with a particular query hours or even days of work.

The present volumes, devoted to what Mallett calls "a period of cold war" (V, v), begin with Lorenzo recently returned from his mission to Naples, and end on the eve of the War of Ferrara. At this time "cotesti cani turchi," as Lorenzo describes them (V, 196), invaded southern Italy, and shifting alliances and a myriad of disputes between the Italian powers, "queste ambiguita in che si truova Italia" (VI, 101), created an acute sense of unease, not least in Lorenzo who here offers, despite his often writing against the clock, a series of shrewd and informed judgments on "le cose di Italia" (V, 206-67) and on the need for peace and the establishment of a general Italian league. In part because of the diplomatic situation, Lorenzo's domestic position was not at all as secure as sometimes it has been said to have been at this time of apparently confident constitutional reform. There were several plots against him, both internal and external, and nocturnal civil disorder was rife in early 1481. Florentine dissatisfaction with the terms of the peace which followed the Pazzi War, in particular the inconclusive and prolonged negotiations concerning the restitution to the city of its southern territories occupied by the King of Naples and the Sienese, caused Lorenzo sharp personal and political embarrassment, as numerous letters here testify.

To employ words he himself often uses in these letters, and elsewhere, Lorenzo's "credito e auctorita" in Florence were often on the line in this period of "tante adversita et persequtioni publice et private" (V, 232), and so it might be argued that the Medicean leader's position in the city was as he himself described it, that he was not its lord (whom the King of Naples thought could "dispose of Florence with a nod") but rather "de' primi" (V, 268), a "cittadino con qualche auctorita, la quale mi bisogna usare con temperenza et iustificatione" (VI, 100). Certainly one sees him in these pages to be well aware of a wider Florentine public opinion, and to be assiduously conferring on diplomatic matters with his "brigata . . . questi principali" (VI, 184), close advisers and friends who by no means always agreed with him and whose occasional "strano pensiero" (VI, 195) he could find hard to restrain. Even so, despite genuine debate on matters of foreign policy within this restricted group, and the importance in this regard of the Otto di Pratica, Lorenzo's role in the making of foreign policy emerges here as an extremely influential one, to the extent that on a number of occasions he in effect conducts a personal diplomacy parallel to that of the public sphere, using the Florentine ambassadors themselves in a dual capacity or even sending his own emissary. Outside foreign affairs, above all in giving directions both to dependent cities and Florentine magistracies on behalf of petitioners, Lorenzo more or less has his own way in these 115 letters, as when he intervenes with the appropriate officials at the request of Arezzo to have this favorite Medici city made exempt from a new tax (V, 251-2). As the shrewd Estensi ambassador Antonio da Montecatini observed when three would-be assassins of Lorenzo were executed in the summer of 1481, "quel stato, el quale se governava per el mezo di Lorencio," paid him high regard indeed in declaring that "chi offende Lorencio on offendera, cometera crimen lese maiestatis..." (V, 227).

Traditional and important questions concerning the nature and extent of Lorenzo's authority in Florence are raised, then, by a reading of these elegant and subtle letters. On the other hand, there are almost completely missing references to his patronage of literature and the visual arts, and to his political cultivation of the Florentine grass roots - though there is an intriguing letter to Ercole d'Este recommending "Pietro di Giovanni, becchaio di casa nostra" (VI, 264) - which reminds us that this magisterial edition tells, in staggering detail, a large part but by no means all of the Laurentian story. Nor is Lorenzo giving very much away about himself in these letters. Rather, with characteristic irony, he may well be spreading false clues for the unwary, as when he talks of "mia natura dolce" (VI, 9), and of his not being "a restless person, a seeker after novelties", but one who "would willingly be satisfied to enjoy the advantages that are mine" (V, 160).

F.W. KENT Monash University