More than for any other area of Europe, the history of late medieval Italy is predominantly an urban one, marked by the political hegemony and dominated by the cultural production of its nascent city-states. How did this urbanization, which took root in Tuscany from the eleventh century onwards, affect the development of political identities there, and how were civic institutions shaped by their urban environments? These questions sit at the heart of these three recent studies of Tuscan city-states which, in contrast to the generation of studies that proliferated between the 1950s and 1970s, attempt to map out a long-term perspective on the relationship between politics and urban life. Bratchel's study, drawing on an inspirational breadth of archival research, offers a wide-ranging study of the political and economic fabric of Lucca and the Lucchese from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. McLean's primary interest is clearly in the exquisite architectural and artistic heritage bequeathed by the citizens of Prato, images of which are copiously and lavishly distributed throughout his book. Peterson and Bornstein have drawn together a impressive collection of critiques and studies that take as their point of departure the principal themes that have occupied John Najemy, to whom the volume is dedicated, during his own prolific and distinguished career as an historian of Florence, including (but not limited to) the Florentine historiographical tradition, the city's political culture from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, political and intellectual networks and the thought of Niccolò Machiavelli.

All three volumes depict the political environment of the newly urbanized Italy as both factional and highly unstable. The directions in which they explore the causes of this feature of urban life betray marked differences in both focus and methodology. For most of the contributors of Peterson and Bornstein's collection, the precipitate root was no doubt ‘the triangulation of power’, as Najemy described it, between magnates, the popolo and the popolo minuto on to which was superimposed a dense and complex patchwork of familial, political and even intellectual networks. Contributors who take up this theme are Julius Kirshner who emphasizes the role of marriage as a legal contract between the city's clans, subject not to feelings of love but hard calculation; Edward Muir, who argues that such attitudes led to the exclusion of women from the public sphere and rendered them as objects who were exchanged in order to cement community trust; Teresa Pugh Rupp, who analyses the depiction of virtue and corruption in Dino Compagni's Chronicle and asserts his intention that they be applied to the institutions of civic life; and Susannah Baxendale's examination of the correlation between kinship and political affiliation amongst the Alberti family. For urban historians essays that, though they explore other tangential themes inspired by Najemy's work, are likely to be of particular interest include Anthony Molho's appraisal of the importance to Hans Baron's famous thesis on ‘the crisis of civic humanism’ of the loss of his position in Germany in 1933; Amy Bloch and Margaret Haines on the relations between artists and their corporate patrons, the city guilds; Saundra Weddle on the cult of the Holy Sepulchre and Florentine imagination of Christian piety; Robert Black's use of the 1427 Catasto to calculate the city's strikingly high rate of male literacy (69.3 per cent); and Humfrey Butters on the embrace of Machiavelli's construction of civic virtue by Enlightenment historians.

Bratchel's study, for all the wealth of data and documentation that he has synthesized, unfortunately sidesteps this question entirely. His primary interest is in the relationship between the rising urban centre and the rural hinterland that surrounded it but he has little to say about the dynamic that drove the development of mechanisms for the distribution of power and control within the urban polity itself. His analysis of political and governmental transformation pays little attention to the mechanisms for the operation of power within the city but is seen entirely through the prism of relations between centre and periphery. As a result, he concludes that the political upheavals that accompanied Lucca's oscillation from Republic to Signoria in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries consolidated, rather than destabilized, governance – an effect that seems unlikely to have been replicated within the city itself. An introduction and conclusion might have gone some way to answering other questions that loom large but are not directly addressed in his argument. In particular, if his assertion is true that it was because they possessed by far the most sophisticated structures of territorial rule that the Lucchese – uniquely amongst the cities of northern Tuscany – managed to resist absorption into the territory of Florence, why was it Florence and not Lucca that was able to achieve this Tuscan hegemony in the first place?

McLean's greater interest in the artistic legacy of late medieval Prato causes him to identify other kinds of factors as crucial to Prato's development as an urban polity. Prato was a ninth-century foundation and lacked both the robust institutional tradition described by Bratchel and the physical and architectural attributes bequeathed to other cities like Lucca by their status as Roman colonies. The importance ascribed to the church and the clergy in sustaining Prato's political identity contradicts the prevailing historiographical emphasis that sees the civic culture of Italian city-states as a largely secular phenomenon but may say less about the city's uniqueness than about the lack of comparable research for other towns. McLean's emphasis on the importance of trade and commerce in shaping the city's cultural and political evolution does, however, have more points of comparison, not least with Richard Goldthwaite's work on Florence. Ultimately, none of these works tackles head on the broader question, previously posed by Philip Jones, which emerges from their focus on individual cities: was the unstable factional government they all describe an inevitable consequence of the urbanization of late medieval Italy? All three, however, provide thoughtfully presented and stimulating contributions that will no doubt provide important points of reference when that comes to be debated in some future work.