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The Duke of Alba. By Henry Kamen. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-300-10283-6. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Short bibliography. Index. Pp. 204. $30.00.
Twenty-one years after an Anglophone historian produced the first scholarly biography of the third duke of Alba-the most famous, and notorious, of Spain's soldiers of the early modern period (W. S. Maltby, Alba: A Biography of Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Third Duke of Alba 1507-1582 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983])-it has been left to another English-speaker to re-evaluate his life and career. Though Kamen modestly directs this relatively short study to the general reader, this is no mere derivative biography of the great duke. The author has carefully reviewed many of the available published collections of primary materials from...