Lorenzo the Magnificent and Girolamo Savonarola are undoubtedly two of the most popular and charismatic men of Renaissance Italy. They both marked an important period of Florentine history, respectively before and after the 1494 revolution that led to the expulsion of the Medici from Florence and to the birth of the Savonarolan republic. While the two periods are traditionally studied separately from each other, Alison Brown's book has the merit of going beyond this traditional historiographical divide to focus on continuity and rupture in the transition from the Medicean regime to the Savonarolan years. The author examines late fifteenth-century Florentine politics, society and ideologies in order to illustrate the most significant differences between those two historical periods but also to explain that not everything changed after 1494. The book under review is a collection of twelve insightful essays, previously published in different contexts between 2000 and 2010, but substantially revised for this new publication. The first of the three sections into which the volume is divided is devoted to the late Laurentian period. Here the image of Lorenzo the Magnificent is seen through the lenses of the people around him, from his functionaries to his son Piero and his opponents. The second section explores the crisis of republicanism and the revolution carried out in Florence in 1494, with a special attention to the change of social structures, factions and ideologies in the passage from one regime to another. The essays of the third and last section of the book provide a wider cultural context to the topics mentioned above, focusing on the loss of belief in republican ideology and on intellectual religious currents in Florence even after Savonarola's death. Some articles deal with more specific topics, such as the papal condemnation of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's theses or the correspondence between Niccolò Michelozzi and the notary Ser Pace di Bambello. However, leaving aside the subject of every single essay, there are many important themes that run across the entire book. Among these are the role of the Florentine oligarchy in both Laurentian and Savonarolan Florence, the evolution of the city's political structures, the relationship between elite and lower classes, and the interaction between politics and political language. The thorough examination of these and other themes make this book a valuable contribution to the history of fifteenth-century Florence that will prove useful to every scholar interested in exploring the evolution of the city before and after 1494.