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doi:10.1017/S0009640711000205 Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe. By Stuart Carroll. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xvi + 345 pp. $34.95 cloth.
This is a rather old-fashioned book: it examines a sixteenth-century aristocratic, indeed a princely family, and especially the wielding of power and influence by its great men. Though this approach has much to recommend it, it tends to ignore history from below, class conflict, mentalities, history as long duration, and more. Genealogical tables and several maps help the reader to keep from getting lost in abundant details, names, or dates, and a lively narrative style holds one's attention. Demonstrating how the Guise family operated as a clan wherein loyalty was demanded and rewarded, the aumor downplays to some extent the significance of a female member of the clan who continues to fascinate many other historians: Mary, Queen of Scots. Carroll's main focus is the multiple ways in which me Guise dukes and cardinals were major political players from the 1540s to the 1590s.
For Carroll, the Guise were not fanatical Catholics ready to put religious purity and orthodoxy above all other considerations. Their archrivals in power politics were fellow Catholics, the Habsburgs, rather than any Protestant family or dynasty. Like other prominent Catholic families, the Guise used appointment to Church benefices more as a means to accumulation of...