Short notices 257 topics were historicaUy and socially conditioned. Rose identifies a shift from an older, more conservative tradition which dualistically idealized or degraded women, to a developing Protestant view which saw women as active and often equal participants in love relationships, and especially in marriage. Though she touches briefly on the—perhaps to us—more marginal relations of incest and homosexuality, Rose's focus rests almost exclusively on heterosexual, exogamic relations. This is somewhat curious, given,firstthereiterationof the theme of incest in the drama of the period, and, secondly, the homoeroticism which must have been occasioned by the spectacle of boy actors playing the parts of women in love with men. Indeed, given the attention in her second chapter to femalemale disguise and the Hie Mulier/Haec Vir debate about such cross-dressing, Rose's skirting of the issue of marginal sexualities and their representation on the Renaissance stage is especially noticeable. David Buchbinder School of Communication and Cultural Studies Curtin University of Technology Sauer, Carl Ortwin, The Early Spanish Main, forward by Anthony Pagden, rpt Berkeley/New York/Los Angeles/Oxford, University of California Press, 1992; cloth and paper; pp. xviii, 306; 6 illustrations, 4 tables, 24 maps; R.R.P. US$40.00 (cloth), $16.00 (paper). Sauer's classic work has still a great deal to offer students of the first European contacts with central America. His sensitivity to the difficulties both sides faced in an encounter which was so ineducibly strange and his shaping of the encounter as a tragedy still has much to commend it even where further scholarship and shifting methodologies have rendered some aspects of his work old-fashioned. Other aspects of his work, such as the perception of the landscape, are coming back into fashion and here his insights remain impressive. He has a gift for creating a telting image and for holding the reader's attention by a skilful use of narrative. The maps and illustrations remain critical to our understanding of the course of events. The appearance of a new edition of the work wdl be widely welcomed. Sybil M . Jack Department of History University of Sydney ...