De Divitiis, Bianca, ed. A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy (1350–1600)

When one thinks about early modern Italy, Florence, Rome, and Venice immediately come to mind.One may look to Milan, or even the minor courts of Ferrara, Urbino, Mantua, and others.Rarely, though, does one think about Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, or other points south of Rome.This is as much a historiographical problem as it is a political one.It reflects the "questione meridonale, " or southern question, and the belief that southern Italy, often called the Mezzogiorno, was too backward and unsophisticated to be successfully integrated into a united Italy.Because the region is so often judged through modern stereotypes and not interrogated with the same critical lens as the North, it has, as Bianca de Divitiis writes in the introduction to this collection, "remained largely untouched by-and indeed because of its circumstances precluded from-the multifaceted cultural, artistic, and social phenomenon known as the Italian Renaissance" (1).While this skewed picture has improved in the past few decades, there is still much to be done, and this collection is an important step towards correcting the misrepresentation of the early modern Mezzogiorno.Across twenty-four chapters, the volume convincingly illustrates that the early modern Mezzogiorno was as complex as anywhere else in Italy.And Naples is not the only focus here: often presented as merely the rural hinterlands of the Neapolitan metropole, the rest of the Mezzogiorno is often completely ignored.To combat this, "the essays here do not take Naples as the main object of their study and analysis but instead as a term of comparison and measure of distance within a new polycentric image of southern Italy" (5).While Naples might have been the capital and largest city of the South, it was hardly the only locus of power or area of investigation: other centres, such as Lecce, Capua, Otranto, and so on, punctuate the essays in this collection.The collection begins with de Divitiis's introductory essay that sets up the collection and provides a useful overview of the region's history from antiquity until early modernity.This overview illustrates how the history of the region has led to, unfairly, the misrepresentation of its history.Crucial here is the fact that the Mezzogiorno was never, or rarely, ruled by "Italians, " a fraught term for the

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