Catherine Fletcher. Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome: The Rise of the Resident Ambassador.

For a short book, Catherine Fletcher’s Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome covers a wide range of aspects of a significant subject in diplomatic history. Papal Rome has been regarded as a center of sixteenth-century European diplomacy because of the number of ambassadors sent there and the importance of the city as a hub for gathering and disseminating information about affairs throughout Europe and beyond. There has also been much emphasis in recent years on Rome as “the theatre of the world,” the place where diplomatic practice and protocols were refined and developed (59). This study, as Catherine Fletcher states, adopts the approach of the “new” diplomatic history, which analyzes diplomacy from the perspective of cultural history rather than from that of political history, which is the stuff of “old” diplomatic history. This is not a book about diplomatic negotiations, about treaties and alliances, but about ceremonies and ritual and performance and the daily lives of ambassadors.