The Defeat of a Renaissance Intellectual: Selected Writings of Francesco Guicciardini. Francesco Guicciardini. Ed. and trans. Carlo Celli. Early Modern Studies Series. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. viii + 228 pp. $99.95

[...]Guicciardini's own notes of excerpts of the sermons of Savonarola is both an expression of the movements of his mind at a crossroads as well as a record of rumination on all that is beyond reason. [...]this volume reveals that the calculated ambition of self-interest that made Guicciardini a less-than-heroic republican citizen helped to make him a great historian, one with no grand theories to pursue, only wonder at the impotence of reason at the hands of fate. First and foremost, he was a trained lawyer, and the first obligation of the lawyer is to serve the client, no matter how personally repugnant.