Robert Southwell, and the Mission of Literature, 1561-1595: Writing Reconciliation (review)
writers for interpretive deficiencies, her book is mainly a narrative of events and has no real interpretive framework of its own to offer. More critically, her book suffers from a methodological flaw. Foreign policy is a holistic enterprise, and studying one component of it — the relations between England and France in terms of Ireland — is necessarily limiting. What one really studies in books like Dr. Lyons’s is the way English policymakers perceived Franco-Irish relations, and scarcely any English policymaker perceived Franco-Irish relations as a threat separate from other international menaces faced by the English. True, during certain periods one threat might have taken precedence over another, but they could never be entirely divorced. WILLIAM PALMER Marshall University