Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/629

 1920 SHORT NOTICES- 621 Bemont displayed a delicate tact in selecting as his subject the part played by Alsace, and by Strasbourg in particular, in the Reformation in England in the sixteenth century. He tells shortly, accurately, and with a perfect clearness the story of such connexion as there was between England and protestant natives or sojourners, in Alsace from 1547 to 1558. Several of the foreign reformers who flocked to England under Edward VI, among them Valerand Poullain, Peter Alexander of Arras, the Pole John Laski, and the Italian Peter Martyr, had at some time preached or lectured in Strasbourg, but M. Bemont devotes most space to Martin Butzer — jpetter known in England as Bucer — whom he accounts ' une des plus belles figures du vieux protestantisme strasbourgeois '. He translates part of an interesting letter from Butzer to Calvin, from Cam- bridge, a letter written, as he notes, almost 370 years to the day before that upon which he was speaking ; the letter, we reassure him, is not printed in the Parker Society's 'Zurich Letters.^ The death of Edward VI refilled Strasbourg with reformers ; some were mere birds of passage on their way to Zurich or Geneva, others stayed, as did Bishop Poynet, who closed his discreditable career there in 1556, and Peter Martjrr, who was restored to his professorship there for two years, till his eucharistic views made him objectionable to the Lutherans. The short stay of two other Englishmen, John Aylmer and Christopher Goodman, gives M. Bemont the opportunity of telling the story of the Puritan claim to disobey governments they deemed idolatrous, and of describing, with a pungent extract, Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Aylmer published at Strasbourg, M. Bemont notes, his reply to Knox's performance. That M. Bemont's monograph is learned and complete his name guarantees. A slight omission might be rectified in his account of Butzer's death, when, he states, his widow was left ' sans ressources ' (p. 10) : an account of Butzer's property shows that it amounted to £380, and that did not include the very considerable list of goods (including 26 pairs of sheets and 32 table-cloths) which the widow had taken home with her.^ It is not easy to discover exactly when M. Bemont supposes the English church to have begun ; he says, ' il serait impossible de mesurer exactement la part qui revient a Strasbourg et a I'Alsace dans la fondation de I'^lfiglise anglicane ' (p. 17), and he holds that Edward VI sanctioned ' toutes les mesures qui poserent les fonde- ments de I'^figlise anglicane ' (p. 6). Short as his essay is and rigidly compressed, M. Bemont allows his sense of humour to play here and there, as when he describes Edward VI as ' un adolescent cultive, trop precoce, peut-etre, consciencieux au point de tenir un Journal ', and repeats a mot of Sir John Cheke to Butzer that ' les Anglais seraient les premiers en tout, si le savoir pouvait s'acquerir sans rien faire '. S. L. 0. In his Etude sur le Phe Charles D'Arenherg (Paris : Librairie St. Fran§ois, 1919) Father Fredegand D'Anvers aims at giving a picture of religious and family life in Belgium in the seventeenth century. The subject of his monograph is Antony, a cadet of the princely house of ^ Ibid. i. 362.
 * There is an English translation in the Original Letters (Parker Society), ii. 545-8.