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Joshua Arthurs, Michael Ebner and Kate Ferris, eds, The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy: Outside the State?

political representation meant to political actors in the pre-modern period. It would have been useful to have had such reflections in more of the case studies, because political theory, while curiously not among the factors listed by Blockmans, seems to me still a crucial factor in determining different institutional forms of political representation. Taking into account the theoretical underpinnings of pre-modern representative government also renders it unnecessary to stop calling them representative institutions, as Hoppenbrouwers proposes. As long as we are aware that the concept of representation undergoes significant changes in the transition from the pre-modern to the modern period, we can continue to acknowledge that there is in fact considerable continuity between the medieval assemblies of estates and the modern parliamentary institutions, in the sense that they both claimed – to speak with Saward – to be representative. On the whole I very much welcome these two new volumes, because they usefully unite different approaches to the study of pre-modern political representation. Moreover, because of the serendipity of their publication and the editors’ shared commitment to using the perspective of empowering interactions in the study of representative institutions – especially since the potential to do so seems not to have been fully realized yet in the volumes themselves – the books set a clear agenda for future research.