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reviewer was particularly struck by the role of a number of formidable femalemembers of some of Italy’s leading families; these included Vittoria Colonna,who was a patron of Valdes, who had her own salon, and who wrote andpublished poetry. According to the dust-jacket blurb, Robin recreates women’scultural and intellectual leadership. Robin herself is perhaps more restrainedand recognizes that men and women worked together. Invaluable appendices listpoets, editors, printers and dedicatees of the fifteen volumes published in theGiolito Poetry Anthology series published between 1545 and 1560, descriptionsof those volumes, and a biographical-bibliographical index of authors, patronsand popes. The text is replete with liberal citations (in English and in the originalItalian or Latin) from the works discussed. University of Dundee CHRISTOPHER STORRS

Reason of State, Propaganda and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translationby Thomas Hobbes. By Noel Malcolm. Clarendon Press. 2007. x + 227pp.£35.00.

The Thirty Years War was many things: a war of religion; a series of territorialand constitutional disputes; a struggle over the identity of Habsburg power. Itwas also a propaganda war. Polemics were published, or circulated as manu-scripts, to inform, exhort or castigate allies, or to savage opponents. Noel Malcolm’simpressive book, likewise, has several identities, grounded on one polemic, theAltera secretissima instructio. The book is supported by six introductory essays,with a parallel text of the Latin tract and Thomas Hobbes’s incomplete Englishtranslation, which Malcolm has finished. In part this book is an intellectualhistory, almost a detective work, as Malcolm expertly demonstrates that thetranslation of the polemic was indeed by Hobbes. Malcolm additionally analysesHobbes’s educational training, and his role as a tutor and secretary to the cousinsWilliam Cavendish (later the earl of Devonshire) and Viscount Mansfield. It wasprobably Mansfield for whom Hobbes provided the translation, even thoughMansfield was less engaged with politics. In two other essays the text is examined,with comparisons made between English and European versions, consideringthe text’s authorship and penetration.

What can be said of the anonymous text itself ? Written during 1626, the thirdin a series, it was fictitiously described as being translated from Dutch, havingbeen printed in The Hague. Malcolm argues, by contrast, that it was the subtlework of an imperial propagandist, probably in service to the court in Vienna,aided by high-level access to information from the empire and beyond. Thepolemic can be located partly in the context of reason of state, a theme touchedupon by Malcolm in another essay, where he also discusses Hobbes in the samecontext. It moreover appealed to different audiences, with its tantalizing accessto political ‘arcana’ and its finer analysis of current affairs, though the complexityof the Latin might have limited its popular readership. Through the disingenuousvoice of an ‘adviser’ to Elector Frederick of the Palatinate, the text examinedEuropean politics at a delicate juncture, when the elector was facing the disinte-gration of the alliance that was supposed in part to help him regain his occupiedpatrimony. Those allies, among them France, Venice and Denmark, are lam-pooned for their failed efforts to aid the forlorn Frederick, either out of self-interestor simple weakness. Nor is Charles I or Buckingham spared from scathing criticism,

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and the text called for the king’s deposition by puritans on behalf of the elector.As Malcolm notes, this ensured the text’s notoriety in England, and also remindsus of the close interaction of England with the continental conflict.

This excellent book is a valuable read for those interested in English andEuropean history. Quite apart from the tract itself, with its inflammatory view ofEuropean power politics in the mid-1620s, this multi-faceted study touches onkey themes of the Thirty Years War. Malcolm’s book opens a fascinatingwindow on how news and commentaries were circulated around Europe, and inthis case on the role played by Hobbes in translating the tract for his patrons.Then, as one might say now, the public appetite for insights into secrets laid barewas a consuming passion.Durham University TOBY OSBORNE

‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution. By Andrew Hopper.Manchester University Press. 2007. 262pp. £16.99.

As Andrew Hopper stresses at the very beginning of this splendid new studyof Sir Thomas Fairfax, he has ‘not set out to provide a conventional . . . narrativebiography’ of the man who led the New Model Army to victory in the EnglishCivil War. Instead, Hopper has focused his attention on those aspects of Fairfax’slife which previous biographers have tended to ignore and has concentrated, inparticular, on Sir Thomas’s activities during the years before he was appointedLord General in 1645 and during the years which followed his resignation fromthat post in 1650. The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Hopper tracesthe course of Fairfax’s life from cradle to grave: following him through his York-shire childhood; his rise to prominence as a parliamentarian military leader;his triumph over Charles I’s armies during the final year of the Civil War; hismilitary and political travails during the later 1640s; his dealings with theregicides in 1649; his gradual stepping-back from public affairs during the 1650sand his withdrawal into ‘secluded disillusion’ during the 1660s. In the secondpart of the book, entitled ‘Fairfax and the Political Culture of Seventeenth-Century England’, Hopper sets out, in his own words, to ‘utilise . . . Fairfax’sexperiences to explain the transformative impact of the English revolution froma new direction and illuminate topics of particular concern in current historiog-raphy’, including ‘civil war allegiance . . . honour, gender and authority and thechanging nature of the relationship between the gentry and the people’. Hoppersucceeds triumphantly in these aims and while the first part of the book isalways lively and stimulating the second part is better still: crammed full of originalideas and insights.

In a series of thought-provoking essays dealing with popular politics in CivilWar Yorkshire; with Fairfax’s attitude towards honour and religion; with Fairfax’spublic image; with public perceptions of Sir Thomas’s wife, Anne (and of thenature of their relationship) and with the ways in which Fairfax was rememberedafter his death, Hopper consistently breaks new ground. The book is written ina clear, readable style throughout and the author has a sharp eye for the tellingphrase and anecdote. Hopper’s detailed knowledge of Fairfax’s North Countrybackground – and of the network of local contacts on which Sir Thomas drewthroughout the course of his career – is one of the book’s greatest strengths.Inevitably, there are one or two places where the author’s arguments do not quite