124BOOK REVIEWS her as a Popish tyrant fell flat. As both Jenny Wormald and Michael Lynch point out, in those years Knox was a liability to his cause. There was a Catholic resurgence in Edinburgh in the mid-1 560's, while Protestant politicians like Moray and Lethington regarded him as a counter-productive nuisance. In a very real sense Knox's work was done by the end of 1560. What was left for him was to write his wonderful History, telling the story of the Reformation in Scotland, and his role in it, as he wished the world to see it. It is one of the most successful Advertisementsfor Myselfever written. Because of it there will, I am sure, be another Knox conference in St. Andrews in 2047. I'm sorry I'll miss it. Maurice LeeJr. Rutgers University Noble Power during the French Wars ofReligion: The Guise Affinity and the Catholic Cause in Normandy. By Stuart Carroll. [Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xv, 298. $59.95.) Stuart Carroll proposes that historians rethink the structure of politics in later sixteenth-century France. Neither underlying social causes, which fascinated scholars between the 1930's and the 1970's,nor the workings of religious conviction, which contemporary scholars have tended to emphasize, adequately explain the French religious wars. Instead, he argues, more attention needs to go to aristocratic interest groups, those collections of friends, relatives, clients, tenants, and servants that clustered around leading nobles. By focussing on the greatest of these, the Catholic Cruise family, and on one province in which they were especially powerful, Carroll tries to show that such groupings decisively shaped sixteenth-century political life. Aristocratic affinities extended far beyond the nobility itself, into seigneurial farms and urban lawcourts and businesses, and they supplied some of the motive forces of sixteenthcentury politics, as well as its customary forms. These concerns place Carroll within a vigorous tradition of British historical thought, that founded by Lewis Namier and Ronald Syme, and his work exhibits both strengths and problems associated with that tradition. His book rests on a remarkable body of archival research and on an unmatched reconstruction of specific political happenings; and it gives unusually close attention to the lesser lights among the Guise, alongside the acknowledged stars. This very impressive research permits a more balanced appreciation of the Guise than we usually get, as well as numerous corrections of other historians' errors of detail. Rather than the Catholic fanatics of tradition, the Guise appear here as relatively open in matters of religious politics. Nor did they play the large role in shaping royal policy that most accounts suggest. On the contrary, the very weakness of their position at court required that they expand and mobilize their provincial fol- BOOK REVIEWS125 lowings, thus demonstrating to the crown the need for placating gestures, both financial and honorific. Not religious orthodoxy, then, but aristocratic honor drove Guise political decisions. They could not allow themselves to be pushed to the margins of political life, and they reacted bitterly to other families (notably the Montmorency) who sought to push them. But together with these virtues come some serious limitations. Like other works in the Namier-Syme tradition, Carroll's narrative frequently crumbles into long and detailed accounts of specific relationships and events, whose significance even specialists may have difficulty appreciating. More serious, his methods tend to magnify the force and scope of the Guise affinity. He considers it mainly at points of peak effectiveness, without establishing what share of the provincial elite attached itself to the Guise, or managed to combine occasional service with a larger independence. This matters, because Jean-Marie Constant has shown that most nobles in fact steered clear of ligueur involvements, either joining the royalists or remaining neutral, despite the power and prominence of families like the Guise. Carroll perhaps misses this fact because he tends to assume the unvarying force of some basic nobiliar values, such as honor and provincial community; he does not give much thought to other values, or ask how nobles' value systems worked as a whole. This book thus teaches us much about how sixteenth-century politics...
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Sep 1, 2004
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