Along with many southern Italian colleagues, Fulvio Delle Donne has reconstituted the history of the late medieval and early modern Mezzogiorno on a firm footing for the new generation. Along with Lorenzo Valla, Giovanni Pontano, Bartolomeo Facio, and others Antonio Beccadelli (1394-1471), known as Panormita, made the court of King Alfonso I the Wise a center of Renaissance learning and political thought. Delle Donne terms their complex of ideas and works a "monarchical humanism" and sets it alongside the humanism of Florence, Rome, or Venice as an equally important form of early modern culture. Their influence reached far beyond the Regno to thinkers as diverse as Erasmus, Luther, and Bellarmine. Delle Donne stresses that the Neapolitans took their equal place among members of the broader European republic of letters.

This volume offers a complete critical edition of Panormita's Dicta aut Facta (c. 26 August 1455). The Dicta's four books are divided into 230 epigrammatic and anthological chapters, each offering exempla of Alfonso's virtues derived from orations (including Alfonso's Contra Theucros), Poggio-style facetiae, anecdotes, didascalia, panegyric, and biography that purport to reveal Alfonso up-close and personal but that follow rhetorical strategies that blend fact and literary invention often directly indebted to classical models. Panormita's literary mediation is omnipresent.

He framed the Dicta as much as an encomium of Alfonso as a speculum principis, encouraging and extolling the king with exempla of royal behavior. It is the work of an engaged intellectual seeking an age of rebirth and reform through the agency of enlightened kingship. Published soon after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, it also aimed to encourage Alfonso and his court to launch a crusade against the Turks. As its manuscript tradition testifies, the Dicta had wide and long impact. Its value remains contested into the twenty-first century (100-109).

Delle Donne offers a complete bibliography (xiv-lix) of all editions of the Dicta from 1485 up to those of López Moreda (Spanish translation 2014), Iandiorio (partial, Italian, 2022), and Delle Donne (Urb. Lat. 1185, Latin and Italian, 2024), editions of Panormita's oeuvre and other primary sources, and Italian, other European, and Anglophone scholarship. His introduction (1-110) reviews Panormita's life, offices, and works and fully analyzes the Dicta aut Facta. There follow (113-31) a detailed discussion of the manuscript tradition of the circa 60 codices and of printings used for this edition (133-34) and an exhaustive treatment of the textual variants and complex stemmata (135-88) that the editor wisely places before Panormita's text. Instead, the edition (189-299) deploys historical and metatextual footnotes. Its generously composed pages are divided by book, paragraph (usually headed), and sentence. Readings are regularized to conform with modern orthography.

There follow (300-314) an edition of Panormita's account of Alfonso's triumphal entry into Naples and an edition of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini's April 1456 commentary on the Dicta and the Triumphus (315-66), thus immediately intertextualizing the Dicta with contemporary reception. Indices by name and place for the Dicta and Piccolomini's commentary follow (375-81). The volume concludes with indices of classical sources, manuscripts, proper names, and places cited (383-405).

To paraphrase Delle Donne (16), the Dicta aut Facta represents a comprehensive recalibration of the traditional system of feudal royalty in which virtù takes precedence over blood and ancestry. Instead, as Guido Cappelli has demonstrated for Neapolitan governance as a whole, Panormita stresses a new model of rulership that is rational, classically traditional, and charismatic and that uses wisdom to redefine power and authority as a humanist model for the philosopher prince who governs with justice.

Delle Donne's methodology is precise, granular, and comprehensive, covering every topic from the dating of the Dicta, to its title, to the author's intent and main themes. The editor presents a careful reading of the proemium to each of the four books, drawing out their themes and the historiographical and other interpretative issues they pose. He supports his interpretation with numerous extracts from the text and a wide and deep reading of the primary sources and secondary literature. Here the ruler's wisdom and religiosity is balanced by his subjects' gratitude, the latter a virtue that goes beyond courtiers' flatteries to recognize the need for a well balanced and loyal polity.

One of the more noteworthy introductory sections (35-44) is Delle Donne's analysis of virtù as the basis of monarchical humanism. Using such classical sources as Xenophon, Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, Valerius Maximus, Arrian, Suetonius, and Isocrates, Panormita offers a vision of rulership hearkening back to Rome's Iberian emperors as Alfonso's models for rule infused with wisdom, fortitude, and religion, underscored by prudence and learning, and founded firmly on lex, ius, and ratio.

Panormita's account of Alfonso's triumphal entry into Naples on 26 February 1443 mirrors this classicism both in its factual account of the king's self-conscious imitation of ancient triumphs and in its literary embellishments of the event to include an allegorical procession of the virtues. It mirrors classical authors including Caesar, evokes Petrarch's Trionfi, and creates a metaphorical doubling for the themes of pax, concordia, and clementia.

This reviewers' only reservation about this excellent edition is that the editor may have underplayed another significant influence on Alfonso's concept of rulership: that of chivalrous knighthood. This was clearly manifested in Alfonso's and his court's constant evocation of the medieval romance tradition (54-57) and made explicit in depictions of his triumph but underplayed also in the Triumphus 20. Alongside Alfonso's device of the open book - his evocation of humanist learning and wisdom - was the king's emblem of the Arthurian siège perilouz marking him as a second Galahad, his obsession with the Holy Grail (which he kept in the cathedral of Valencia and which he pawned to fund his conquest of Naples), his encouragement of the Arthurian romances as models for his court, and his real-life projection of himself as the chivalrous protector of Giovanna II, Naples' last Angevin queen. These all point to an aspect of his rule that the humanist Panormita most likely deliberately underplayed.

Although Delle Donne discusses the Galahad theme, he does so in the context of "folkloric" influence and seems to adopt Panormita's notion of a historical discontinuity of influence. Here he might have devoted a bit more analysis to both Alfonso's own love of medieval romances and his chivalrous (and sometimes irrational) actions. Both aspects together round out our understanding of Alfonso as both a humanist ruler and as a late medieval figure whose court synthesized both cultures. It also by contrast underscores Panormita's clear focus on Alfonso as an avatar of ancient imperium.

Ronald G. Musto