Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/305

 1922 SHORT NOTICES 297 bines classical commonplaces with examples from fifteenth-century Italy. It also shows Lionel of Este as his patron after he quitted England. The complete publication of this new text of an undeservedly neglected humanist is much to be desired. C. W. P. 0. Mr. F. L. Taylor's essay on The Art of War in Italy, 1494-1529, which won the Prince Consort's prize in 1920 (Cambridge : University Press, 1921), is a very serviceable work on the revolution in Italian warfare caused by the French invasion of 1494. He traces its effects separately on the several services, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and siege warfare. A chapter named ' Tactics ' is illustrated by short accounts of the battles of Fornovo, Cerignola, Agnadello, Ravenna, Novara, Marignano, Bicocca, and Pavia, while a valuable appendix deals at length with Ravenna, for which authorities are numerous, and where the general position is clearer than usual, though there are differences in detail, especially in relation to the death of Gaston de Foix. If the book is, as we hope, enlarged, more space might be given to Agnadello, which had important results, and is interesting both for strategy and tactics, though not easy. The mere brook, across which it was fought, can hardly be described as a river such as the Taro at Fornovo or the Ronco at Ravenna. The high ground of which Mr. Taylor, with other writers for example, Ranke speaks, is imperceptible. When the action was engaged, Alviano was not present, and when he reached the attacked rear-guard it was scarcely possible for him, apart from his temperament, to break off action. In that case the French would have turned the Venetian rear instead of their van, which Pitigliano had believed to be their objective, and perhaps originally was. We may draw the conclusions that the Italians, in spite or because of the Renaissance, were behind the rest of Europe in the art of war, and were at the moment singularly lacking in great generals, such as Car- magnola, Francesco Sforza, or the Piccinini. No great improvement was shown by the close of the period in Italian infantry or cavalry, but the scientific services were quick to adapt and improve upon the arts of gunnery and the attack and defence of fortresses, in which their experts became masters. The actual effects of the French guns in 1494-6 are perhaps usually exaggerated ; the two or three fortifications which they knocked to pieces were of trifling strength ; it is doubtful what practice they would have made against the new constructions at Sarzana or Ostia ; as field artillery at Fornovo their execution was not great. The chapter on military writers will be found useful. Machiavelli perhaps plays too preponderant a part, but that is inevitable, for Machiavelli is the modern historians' variant in the text of the old lady's phrase, ' That blessed word Mesopotamia '. E. A. The Studier i Dansk Herregaards Arkitektur i 16. og 17. Aarhundrede, by the well-known Danish architect and historian, Vilhelm Lorenzen, have been- published by the Dansk Historisk Forening as part, and instead of the regular issue for 1920 and the first six months of 1921, of the Dansk Historisk Tidsskrift, and they certainly repay this munificence. Taking their subject up at the most interesting period, that of transition between