Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England. Diana O'HaraThe Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Tudor England. Retha Warnicke
draws from these sources a dark picture of Renaissance personal combat. Theorists understood that lives were at risk in every fight, and therefore no one could afford scruples about shady technique; some teachers insisted that even training take place with unprotected weapons, to accustom their pupils to the emotions of real struggle. But exactly how violent a world was this? Anglo fully demonstrates how unpleasant the martial arts might be in application (indeed, he describes numerous forms of unpleasantness that the reader might not otherwise have envisioned). He is less concerned to define larger contexts, and thus he says little about numbers of duels and street fights, and very little about the participants' social standing. Some years ago, Francois Billacois argued that Renaissance duelling was highly place specific, epidemic in France but fairly infrequent in other countries. Anglo firmly believes that the habit was common everywhere, and he sees the martial arts teachers as both product and cause of its prevalence; everyone needed some training, given the likelihood of assault, and well-trained fighters were eager to provoke quarrels. Only anecdotal evidence is offered, though, and the relations between martial arts and daily life do not receive systematic analysis. Another open question concerns relations among different forms of violence. Anglo returns at several points to the development of court culture during the Renaissance, which he sees as marked by the nobility's "mutation from warrior to ceremonial puppet" (169). But these were also years in which armies grew in size and suffered rising percentages of casualties, making it very likely that the seventeenth-century courtier would encounter real war as well as balletic jousting — and that wartime experiences would be especially horrific. Sites of upper class violence clearly changed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it is less clear that its total quantity diminished. Questions thus arise about some of Anglo's broadest claims, but these are peripheral to his real subject matter. As an explication of what Renaissance fighting was like, his book is an impressive achievement. JONATHAN DEWALD SUNY at Buffalo