The Age of Catherine de Medici. By J. E. Neale.
(Cape. 6s.)
WHEN Arthur Young was visiting the castles of the Loire not long before the French Revolution, he observed that the leaders of the French Wars of Religion " could not have been better employed than in cutting one another's throats." One suspects that some of his harshness was due to the extreme difficulty of disentangling their complicated plots and confusing relationships—and it is this diffi- culty which Professor Neale's book successfully combats. He declares that it is not a product of scholarship or research, but readers of his book on Queen Elizabeth will probably consider him too modest, owing to his exceptional knowledge of European tangles in the sixteenth century. He expounds most lucidly the corruption of the French Churon (probably even worse than it was elsewhere in Europe, owing to Crown patronage), the origins of the Huguenot party, the great families of Bourbon, Guise and Montmorency, and what they usually stood for. There is so much ground to cover that inevitably the author cannot stop to make vivid the individual events in these wars—e.g., the massacre of St. Bartholomew is far less dramatic than in Thompson's accounts embellished from the yournal of Marguerite of Navarre. Apart from this, the book gives a clear and authoritative summary, reinforced by occasional parallels drawn from present times.
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