EARLY MODERN

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© 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.

govern a country where power had to be negotiated with the representative
states.

Kamen tells a good story and his assessments of the duke’s successes and

failures are invariably judicious. It is, however, a story that he has in large part
told before: substantial chunks of The Duke of Alba have been recycled verbatim
from his Philip of Spain, published in 1997. Given the significance of the duke’s
time in the Netherlands, he regrettably neglects recent research in English on the
Revolt – neither Hibben on Gouda nor Marnef on Antwerp seem to have been
consulted. Nonetheless, the general reader will enjoy this fluent, fair-minded and
perceptive study of ‘the iron duke’.
University of Southampton

ALASTAIR DUKE

Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon. By
David Lederer. Cambridge University Press. 2006. xvii + 361pp. £50.00/$90.00.

This book is a revised and much expanded version of David Lederer’s 1995

thesis. Described as a regional analysis of an aspect of early modern healthcare,
and positioned between Michael MacDonald’s Mystical Bedlam (1981) and Eric
Midelfort’s Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany (1994), it ranges widely over
Counter-Reformation Catholicism and political absolutism as well as the social
history of medicine in central Europe. Dealing mainly with the period c.1579–
1679, Lederer treats madness as a way of explicating social, cultural and
political life. He makes extensive use of (often fascinating) case studies ‘to locate
individuals within a web of contributory social and material circumstances, as
well as within the contemporary terms of spiritual physic’ (p. 40), which last
constituted early modern ‘psychiatry’. The sources used (mainly records of
miracles, pilgrimages and exorcisms) give religion a centrality and the first five
chapters deal with its ramifications. They are the best part of the book and give
an unusual and intriguing insight into early modern spirituality. Chapter 6
covers suicide and the development of institutional care for the mad, culminating
in the first Bavarian public lunatic asylum in 1803. Lederer is on the one hand
cautious about orthodox interpretations that, for example, see suicide being
decriminalized, secularized and medicalized over time (‘The history of clinical
psychiatry . . . followed a serpentine path’, p. 291), yet at the same time he tends
ultimately to accept this model: ‘patterns of suicide verdicts are indicative of a
diabolic crisis and a psychological revolution, coinciding with the forward
march of the insanity defense throughout Europe in the later seventeenth
century’ (p. 256). There is much excellent material in this book, but the reader
needs to work hard for it. The extensive approach means that multiple explanations
are offered without always being reconciling; dyads like state versus people and
elite versus popular look worryingly old-fashioned; and in the background sits
the notion of a ‘general crisis’, onto which a considerable weight of interpretation
is placed. It is not clear that the excursus on Freud in chapter 7 adds much to
the book and the link between early modern developments and later ‘bourgeois
psychiatry’ is suggestive rather than proven. There are times when the ordering
of material (and sometimes even of sentences) makes it difficult to follow the
argument (‘a serpentine path’): for example, the legal and institutional background
becomes clearer as the book progresses, but non-specialists might have found
that a preliminary exposition of these aspects (and the sources used) made it

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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

© 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.

easier to follow. This is a shame as the book deserves to be widely read both for
the subject and the region it covers.
University of St Andrews

R. A. HOUSTON

Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-
Century Britain. By Troy Bickham. Clarendon Press, Oxford. 2005. xii + 301pp.
£50.00.

Before the Seven Years War Indians were viewed as exotic curiosities, but not

with scientific observation. Thus when four Mohawks were brought to England
in 1710 they had been represented as Indian kings and associated more with the
east than with the west. Indian attacks on the British empire’s western border in
Pennsylvania in 1754, however, changed all that, as Dr Bickham amply
demonstrates. From then until the end of the War of American Independence
they were the subject of intense and even scholarly scrutiny. There was a steep
learning curve for most Britons to climb in this process, and ‘the press was the
nation’s pedagogue’. Bickham shows how the metropolitan and provincial
papers created a national forum in which readers of most if not all classes
received instruction about events in North America and the role which the
Indians played in them. They were almost universally depicted as savages
capable of the most inhuman acts of war. The only consolation was that some
were on the British rather than the French side in the Seven Years War, and were
therefore ‘our’ savages. There were few attempts to mitigate the matter by
portraying them as ‘noble’ – even the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment
saw Indians as primitives exemplifying the very first stage of human society,
while the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel regarded them as bloodthirsty
barbarians. The British government’s concern to acquire Indian allies was partly
responsible for the creation in 1756 of two posts of superintendents of Indian
affairs, who distributed largesse to bribe Indians to support the war effort. After
the war what Bickham calls a ‘new imperial regime’ was set up to handle Indian
affairs. He even concludes that ‘in comparison to Britain’s government of its
mainland colonies, the programme for the interior was a great success’. It kept
the peace on the frontier and prevented the French and Spanish exploiting the
Indians. The policy was short-lived, however, coming to an end with the outbreak
of the War of American Independence. British use of Indian allies against the
colonists led George III to be denounced in the Declaration of Independence
for employing ‘merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an un-
distinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions’.
University of Leeds

W. A. SPECK

Late Modern

Quakers, Jews, and Science: Religious Responses to Modernity and the Sciences in
Britain, 1650–1900. By Geoffrey Cantor. Oxford University Press. 2005. xii +
420pp. £50.00.

Geoffrey Cantor is familiar to historians of ‘science and religion’ for his study

of the Sandemanian ‘scientist’ Michael Faraday and for a collection of essays
written in collaboration with John Hedley Brooke. Repudiating the simple ‘conflict