War and Peace: Alberico Gentili and the Early Modern Law of Nations. Valentina Vadi. Legal History Library 37; Studies in the History of International Law 14. Leiden: Brill, 2020. xxvi + 566 pp. €160

In War and Peace, Valentina Vadi manages, by building on a solid legal background and a rigorous methodological framework, to show the role that Gentili played in the birth of the early modern law of nations and its development into an autonomous discipline, thus filling a gap in existing scholarship. Chapters 4–6 shed light on how Gentili contributed “a number of concepts we [now] take for granted” (189) to different branches of what would later become modern international law, from diplomatic law—his De Legationibus being the first legal treatise on the subject—to the law of war, to the law of the sea, with his conceptualization of the (limited) freedom of the sea and fierce condemnation of piracy. [...]chapter 8 is dedicated to a comparison between Gentili's and Hugo Grotius's works.