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. 

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.