466BOOK REVIEWS century Rome and Amsterdam. The images vary from architectural plans to ink drawings, woodcuts, and stately portraits of seventeenth-century notables. Equally valuable are the many tables and graphs which offer useful data on such concerns as mortality and fertility rates, household size, and the numbers of criminal offenses over the course of the century. The first half of the volume concerns the broader institutional and structural aspects of urban life in seventeenth-century Rome and Amsterdam. Luigi Spezzaferro 's "Baroque Rome: A 'Modern City'" argues that it was the late sixteenthcentury pontificate of Sixtus V (1585-1590) which proved pivotal in the shift in Roman architecture and urban planning toward a modern orientation. Conceptualizing this revived Roman urban space as a kind of "theater of modern life," Spezzaferro notes the "novelty" of the city plans developed by the pope's designers (and those of his successors) as forward-looking, and integrated more realistically with the living city, rather than pointing backward toward the Eternal City's ancient past. Koen Ottenheym's "The Amsterdam Ring of Canals: City Planning and Architecture " provides a detailed and insightful discussion of the development of socially-differentiated residential and industrial neighborhoods through the construction of new canals in the seventeenth century. This building project, the historian notes, was geared toward meeting the demands of the rising merchant elites, rather than a public works project to beautify the city as symbol, as in the case of Rome. In the second part of this book, scholars turn their attentions to the specific living conditions in seventeenth-century Rome and Amsterdam. It is impossible to discuss the wide range of topics under consideration, so I wfll simply point to a few notable "pairs" which show the promise of a comparative volume such as this. Laurie Nussdorfer and Henk van Nierop's explorations of the respective poUtical cultures of the two cities, and the complex relationships between populace and authorities, work well together and provide fascinating material for classroom considerations of emerging models of political rule in urban Europe in the seventeenth century. Elsewhere, Angela Groppi and Simon Groenveld offer insightful analyses of emerging models of poor relief in these two European capitals, highlighting the significant interplay between religion, politics, and conceptions of public welfare in early modern Europe. Jennifer D. Selwyn University ofNew Hampshire Government by Polemic:James I, the King's Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603-1625. By Lori Anne Ferrell. (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1998. Pp. xv, 231. $49.50.) A major plank in the recent rehabilitation ofJames I is that his effective management of religious tensions produced a balanced and harmonious Church, BOOK REVIEWS467 which has been contrasted with the divisions and turmoil stirred up by his successor . Some scholars have cautioned against pushing this too far, noting the unresolved theological issues and pastoral priorities within his Church as well as the Jacobean antecedents of Laudian thought and action, but Government by Polemic represents an important post-revisionist analysis of this fragile situation . While the author accepts both James's construction of his rule as a moderate stance between the twin perils of popery and Puritanism, and the defacto accommodation between moderate Puritans and the ecclesiastical authorities in the dioceses, she argues that a study of the king's writings and printed court sermons reveals a significant and evolving anti-Puritan rhetoric which historians have hitherto underplayed. 'Moderation' or the much-vaunted via media became a rhetorical strategy with which to lambaste conforming Puritanism, which by 1625 was "belittled, discredited and finaUy sidelined." Nor was this the achievement of a tiny minority, for FerreU claims that the ecclesiology and polemic of Andrewes and Buckeridge represented the mainstream at court rather than the voice of a precociously avant-garde conformity; in short, another and different manifestation of the Jacobean "conformist drift" identified by Anthony Milton and Peter Lake, which laid the foundations of widespread anti-Puritan polemic in the 1630's. It would have been useful to see this developed and tested with reference to such preachers as HaU, Preston, and Prideaux, whose court sermons do not feature here. Though the interpretation is pretty persuasive, the keystone of her case, the...