Joint-Stock War

Valerie Pearl

• The Age of Elizabeth: England Under the Later Tudors 1547-1603 by D.M. Palliser
  Longman, 450 pp, £13.95, April 1983, ISBN 0 582 48580 0
• After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe 1588-1595 by R.B. Wernham
  Oxford, 613 pp, £32.50, February 1984, ISBN 0 19 822753 1
• The Defeat of the Spanish Armada by Garrett Mattingly
  Cape, 384 pp, £12.50, November 1983, ISBN 0 224 02070 6
• The First Elizabeth by Carolly Erickson
  Macmillan, 446 pp, £9.95, October 1983, ISBN 0 333 36168 7
• The Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland: Essays in Honour of Gordon Donaldson edited by Ian Cowan and Duncan Shaw
  Scottish Academic Press, 261 pp, £14.50, March 1983, ISBN 0 7073 0261 7

Dr Palliser’s The Age of Elizabeth is the latest volume in a series which seeks to relate English and British economic and social history from the Anglo-Saxons to the Welfare State. Its initial and terminal dates as given in the title appear to follow a publisher’s or general editor’s dictum under which successive volumes will start to cover the precise date on which a previous author closed his account. Hence the ‘age of Elizabeth’ appears to begin from 1547 with the reign of Edward VI. Such concessions to historical ‘tidiness’ (or are they concessions to the continuing draw of Elizabeth’s name?) are small matters. The author does not allow himself to be too closely confined by artificial boundary posts.