This volume of seventeen essays emerges from a seminar organised in Nice in 1988 by Rosa Maria Dessì that took as its theme the relationship between preached discourses of peace and their function in the municipal governments of later medieval Italy. Round-table discussions followed in 2001 and again in 2002 in which the geographical map was broadened to include England and France. As a consequence, the framework for the discussion now had to consider not only the English and French monarchies' uses of peace discourses but also those of the papacy and the Angevin rulers of the Kingdom of Sicily. Sources used range from such celebrated tracts as Guibert of Tournai's Tractatus de pace, Remigio de' Girolami's De bono pacis and Marsilio of Padua's Defensor pacis to papal registers, narrative accounts of diplomatic peace treaties, hagiography and communal statutes. Sermon literature is perforce foregrounded and its range is far-reaching: it includes the work of such well-known medieval practitioners of the genre as Giordano da Pisa and Federico Visconti as well as a run of discourses by Speakers and Chancellors made in the English parliament between 1362 and 1447.

The volume is divided into two parts, the first of which examines peace discourses as used by the papal and royal monarchies of France and England while the second looks at how they functioned in the Italian communal context; these sections are preceded by an essay by Françoise Monfrin, ‘Guerre et paix de l'antiquité classique à l'empire chrétien’, which aims to trace the development of conceptions of peace from antiquity through late antiquity. Monfrin does this by looking at the evolution of the concept of just war as it evolved into its medieval incarnation of holy war. Both Monique Zerner's ‘Le Negotium pacis et fidei ou l'affaire de paix et de foi, une désignation de la croisade albigeoise à revoir’, and Andrea Piazza's ‘Paix et hérétiques dans l'Italie communale: les stratégies du langage dans les registres du pape Grégoirie ix’, take up the important theme of how during the pontificate of Innocent iii and throughout the medieval period the papacy constructed an ideology of peace aimed at repressing heresy that branded schismatics and heretics as enemies of God's peace and concord. Elsa Marmursztejn examines a number of scholastic writers in ‘Guerre juste et paix chez les scolastiques’ to show that with the great exception of Aquinas, peace itself was rarely discussed in the summae except in relation to just war, war waged for the purpose of peace. Carla Casagrande's essay, ‘Le Roi, les anges et la paix chez le franciscain Guibert de Tournai († vers 1248)’, compares Guibert of Tournai's two treatises on peace, Tractatus de pace and Eruditio regum et principum, concluding that the latter work, destined for the use of Louis ix, italicised the figure of the king as mediator of peace between God and men. In the first paper actually to deal with sermon literature, Hervé Martin's ‘Des Prédicateurs français du bas moyen âge entre guerre et paix’ looks at French preaching (particularly the sermons of Laurent de la Faye) on Charles vi's various military campaigns between 1380 and 1500. In a methodological departure for this volume, Jean-Philippe Genet's ‘Paix et guerre dans les sermons parlementaires anglais (1362–1447)’ quantitatively analyses English parliamentary discourses, for instances of peace discussions, in the sermons delivered by the Chancellors and Speakers over the course of three-quarters of a century. Focusing on narrative accounts of signed diplomatic peace treaties, Nicolas Offenstadt's ‘La Paix proclamée: acteurs, gestes et réception de la publication des accords de paix pendant la guerre de Cent Ans’ takes a cultural turn by looking at the places, persons, gestures and oral performances which combined to create a ‘ritual of publication’ of peace treaties during the Hundred Years War. And finally in this first section, in ‘L'Excommunication des agresseurs des terres de l'Église (Avignon, Comtat Venaissin aux xive et xve siècles)’, Germain Butaud demonstrates how the papal weapon of excommunication was brought to bear upon those who disturbed the peace of French ecclesiastical territories.

The second part of the volume opens with the editor's own contribution, ‘Pratiques de la parole de paix dans l'histoire de l'Italie urbaine’, which is perhaps the only essay that really delivers upon the promise of the book's title. Dessì's rich essay, based on hagiographical and sermon sources, and informed by Bourdieu's notion of habitus, looks at peace as a social practice in the Italian communes from the age of St Francis to the end of the fifteenth century. She suggests that the pacification campaigns of the mendicant friars, who had usurped the role of the concionatore, should be regarded as spiritual propagandists for the new popular republican governments, which themselves had made internal peace and concord an integral part of their political agenda. Raimondo Michetti's, ‘François d'Assise et la paix révélée: réflexions sur le mythe du pacifisme franciscain et sur la prédication de paix dans la société communale du xiiie siècle’ presents a fascinating double-barrelled argument. On the historiographical level he argues that the image of St Francis – the pacifist saint – was constructed, reconstructed and continuously infused with new meaning by various political factions over the course of the twentieth century. His second point is that notwithstanding a few famous episodes of peacemaking reported in the medieval sources, an attentive reading of that contemporary corpus shows that Francis was far more concerned with peace on the theological and eschatological level than as it was practised by the republican communes of his time. Massimo Vallerani's ‘Mouvements de paix dans une commune de Popolo: les Flagellants à Pérouse en 1260’, is, I think, the most ambitious piece in the volume. His essay attempts to link into a coherent programme the Flagellant movement led by Rainero Fasani and the ordinances enacted by the popolo of Perugia, both dating from 1260. Here penance and peace find their expression as a project of the popolo, a theme again pursued in Nicole Bériou's ‘Le Sermon sur la paix prononcé devant le conseil communale de Pise par Federico Visconti en 1267’, which analyses a peace sermon of Federico Visconti, Pisa's archbishop, preached on the occasion of Charles of Anjou's arrival in Tuscany as paciale, sent by Clement iv. Cecilia Iannella's ‘La Paix dans la prédication du dominicain Giordano de Pise (vers 1260–1310)’, examines the vernacular peace sermons of this Dominican friar to demonstrate his concern for practical peace: the peace of the bene comune. In ‘La Prédication de Robert de Sicile (1306–1343) et les communes d'Italie: le cas de Gênes’, Jean-Paul Boyer provides an edition of four sermons of the preaching king, Robert of Anjou, who used the vehicle of preaching in an attempt to pacify the city of Genoa, faction-riven by Guelf and Ghibelline parties. Looking at fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florentine statutes, Patrick Gilli's, ‘De L'Importance d’être hors norme: la pratique diplomatique de Giannozzo Manetti d'après son biographe Naldo Naldi’, tries to discern the role of the ambassador and nuncio in the later medieval period. Finally, following in the tracks of Richard Trexler, Ilaria Taddei's ‘L'Idéal de paix dans les confréries de jeunesse à Florence au xve siècle’, argues that the rituals of Florence's youth confraternities helped to model peace for the community by socialising their young members in non-violent and peaceful practices.

Such divergent concepts and practices of peace investigated in these essays, combined with regions and chronologies that are not always easily compared, makes for a volume which, despite the high calibre of scholarship and the editor's best efforts to yoke all the work under the rubric of ‘preaching peace and disciplining society’, does not always hold together thematically as well as one would wish. This is a case in which the sum of the parts does not necessarily add up to the whole. One final note: I have cited the paper titles as they appear in the table of contents; for citation purposes, however, the reader should be warned that the titles of the chapters themselves sometimes diverge slightly from this form.