This chapter examines Napoleon’s 1796-1797 Italian Campaign, which covers a crucial period in the French Revolutionary Wars. During this campaign the young, largely unknown Corsican, in his first command, led the French Army to triumph over the superior forces of the Austrian and Sardinian Armies. In just ten months, the French marched to one victory after another until their Austrian enemy was pushed back to Vienna and the war was triumphantly concluded with a peace treaty that consolidated France’s dominant position in Western Europe.

Reassessing the speech on Platonic love by the interlocutor Pietro Bembo in The Book of the Courtier (1528), this essay discusses Castiglione’s Platonic love ideology both as a philosophy and as the theoretical underpinning of an amorous praxis. After an overview of the reception of Platonic love during this stage of the Italian Renaissance, it examines to what extent Bembo’s discourse reflects Ficinian Neoplatonic notions of love as enjoyment of beauty and ascent toward the divine. While Castiglione echoes Ficino in his emphasis on the role of reason, Bembo creates a more permissive standard for younger lovers and for older lovers sanctions the kiss as a pivotal point on the ascent towards spiritual love, thus reconciling contemplative aspects of Platonic love with the concrete amorous dynamics of court life. Moreover, Bembo’s speech is predicated on the awareness that desire can degenerate into fury, an aspect that is discussed in the context of the contra amorem tradition. Literary form is a constant consideration: as a Ciceronian dialogue, the text not only projects an ideal Renaissance court, but also has a mimetic function in that its medium reflects and supports its content.

It was consistent with both humanism and the growth of political bureaucracy that humanisticallyeducated ‘new men’ took roles as counsellors in the courts of both early Tudor kings. This chapter explores the role of the counsellor in the work of three leading Renaissance humanists: Erasmus, More and Castiglione. Each accepted that good counsel should, to varying degrees, rule the prince. At the heart of their writings remains, however, a question about the efficacy of counsel in a hereditary monarchy. Often overlooked in this debate is importance of Seneca, who provides the basis for the discussion of the effectiveness of counsel in all three writers’ works, contrasting principles learned through instruction from precepts gathered through counsel.