Those interested in Elizabethan foreign policy as well as historians of later sixteenth-century France will be grateful to David Potter for this scrupulous and erudite edition, which forms volume 25 of the Royal Historical Society's Camden Fifth Series. The first, anonymous treatise exists in two versions, both in French, to be found in the British Library and in the Public Record Office (now the National Archives). The first version is deduced, from internal evidence, to have been drafted in early 1580 but copied and emended towards the end of 1583; the idioms and the errors remaining suggest that its author was an Englishman. In two parts, it first analyses the key players at court, followed by a brief survey of the causes of the major factional conflicts; its second part is a survey of the provinces of France, noting the provincial governors and those of key towns, identifying leading families and their connections, and offering a brief assessment of economic strengths and weaknesses. The second version is identified as being almost certainly a copy of the second part, dealing with the provinces, made by the young Robert Cecil during a visit to the Paris embassy of Sir Edward Stafford in August–September 1584. The second treatise, by a Richard Cooke of Kent, is closely related to the two versions of the provincial survey described above, but offers a great deal more detail, especially in the case of Normandy. In particular he provides assessments of the wealth, age and religious affiliation—Protestant, Papist and a third uncertain category, possibly neutral or royalist—of significant nobles. Unfortunately, Cooke's work has not survived in its entirety and the present treatise covers only Picardy, Brittany, and the Ile-de-France, besides Normandy. Cooke appears to have been in France with Sir Henry Cobham, ambassador to Paris in the early 1580s, but a full account of his career cannot be fully documented. As Dr Potter notes, current historiography reflects several of the concerns of these treatises, whether in prosopographies of the court or analyses of provincial affinities. On the basis of such studies, as well as older standard works of reference, the information in these treatises is shown to be fairly accurate, including the very detailed accounts by Cooke. While this is comforting for those who place their trust in the intelligence community, it is also evident that some information is inaccurate or significantly out-of-date. The editorial apparatus carefully notes many such problems and ambiguities, but introduces some of its own: p. 60, n.30 conflates La Tour vicomte de Turenne, husband of Léonor de Montmorency, with La Trémoille duc de Thouars who married Léonor's sister, Jeanne; and 1572 rather than February 1573 is throughout given as the date of comte de Candale's death at the siege of Sommières, an error that seems to have been taken from Père Anselme's genealogical compilation. Richard Cooke is also somewhat confused about the surviving Montmorency sisters, with only the duchesses of Thouars, whom he omits entirely, and Ventadour living by the early 1580s; he implausibly imputes Protestant views to the Candale and Ventadour offspring though he is correct about Turenne and he could also so have described the La Trémoille children. All the texts correctly have Pibrac's surname as Du Faur, so it seems odd that notes and index give ‘Du Four’. Comments on governors in Languedoc in the first treatise suggest that its first draft drew upon information of 1578 or even earlier. Jean de Nadal, seigneur de La Crouzette (= La Cozette, p. 81) was governor of Leucate from April 1568, where he was perhaps succeeded by Jean de Boursier, seigneur du Barry by 1578, as signalled in n.163. Pierre de Baudéan, captain Parabère (=Pirabel, p. 81) was Beaucaire's governor up to 8 September 1578 when, though once a Montmorency client, his assassination on Damville's orders provoked a siege of the chateau of Beaucaire which seriously threatened the peace until February 1579. Overall, this is a work of magnificent scholarship; the notes evidently draw on a deep and broad familiarity with even obscure corners of the historiography—which perhaps makes it all the more surprising that the note on Bellièvre cites only the slighter, older studies by Kierstead and Dickerman, rather than Olivier Poncet's magisterial life published in 1998.