The royal doctors, 1485–1714: medical personnel at the Tudor and Stuart courts

during those decades. On so general a level, of course, this point has been well articulated before, for example by Henry Kamen's The iron century (originally published in 1971). The authors depart from standard narratives, however, in emphasizing the ways in which certain early modem societies managed to escape the Malthusian dilemma of ever-increasing population and limited food supplies. They are persuaded by David Arnold, Ester Boserup, and especially Ronald Seavoy, that there were means by which peasants could break out of subsistence agriculture, and that the main mechanism lay in "becoming a commercial society, producing food primarily for sale to the market" (p. 204). In early modem Europe, the two first societies to find this solution were England and the Netherlands, and it was no accident, therefore, that they were the first agrarian societies to conquer the threat of famine. What makes this book stand out from others, however, is the attention the authors lavish on religious interpretations of this period of new disasters and epidemics. But it is also here that the attentive reader senses an important difficulty. Cunningham and Grell tell us that all Europeans fitted their experience of mortality and threat into a renewed sense of apocalypticism, but almost all their examples come from Protestant Europe. At times they admit that apocalyptic expectations were stronger or clearer in northern Europe, and perhaps this explains why the book's subtitle refers to "Reformation Europe". Can it really be said that Southern and Catholic Europe shivered under the same expectations as their Protestant brethren? The evidence collected would seem to suggest otherwise. The authors are not, however, very well equipped to disentangle the various competing strands of apocalyptic thought. There was in fact no real consensus on what the white horse meant, for example, nor did Protestants agree on what the Apocalypse itself would be like. This was a point emphasized some time ago by William Lamont in his Godly rule: politics and religion, 1603-1660 (1969), and more recently by Robin Barnes, 'Images of hope and despair: western Apocalypticism ca. 1500-1800', in Bernard McGinn et al. (eds), Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 2 (1998). If Grell and Cunningham had paid adequate attention to the varieties of apocalyptic expectation, they might have managed to present a more plausible thesis about the ways in which all Europeans used the Revelation of St John as the lens through which they understood their turbulent age. Even so, they have written an important book that stimulates even as it summarizes. The abundance of excellent illustrations also makes the book a joy to look at.