Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/130

 122 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January so liberally as to embrace the whole range of official and unofficial docu- ments from Parliament Rolls and Close Rolls to Piero Griffo's ' History of Peter's Pence in England '. l As the series of calendars progressed fresh bodies of material became accessible, and Dr. Gairdner opened his net still more widely ignoring still more boldly that ' preserved in England ' that graced his title-page to the very last volume. Spanish and Venetian Calendars began to appear, the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission rapidly increased in bulk, Scottish records were being printed ; not only did Gairdner in his later volumes draw upon these, but he began using materials that Brewer had either not known or not considered relevant, his summaries of the documents became fuller, and he was able to append to them more exact references to the original manuscripts. In all these matters the first two or three volumes of the Letters and Papers necessarily presented a striking contrast to the final ones, and it has been Mr. Brodie's task to bring them up to this later standard. Merely to enumerate the new sources of information that he has tapped would more than occupy the space at our disposal : the Diaries of Marino Sanuto, the Spanish, Venetian, and Milanese Calendars, the Roman and Paris transcripts in the Record Office, Le Glay's Correspondance de I'Empereur Maximilien I er et de Marguerite d'Autriche and his Negociations diplomatiques entre la France et VAutriche, the Navy Records Society's tenth volume, the Confirmation and Pardon Rolls, the Exchequer Accounts, the Calais Accounts (T. R. Calais Comptr. Accts.), the vast bulk of the Additional Manuscripts, and the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission are but a few of the more important. But his energy has not been confined to the calendaring of new materials ; the older collections used by Brewer have been resifted, and a considerable number of fresh documents have been included from the State Papers of Henry VIII, the letters of Louis XII and of Erasmus, the Close Rolls, and so on. The vast majority of Brewer's summaries have been revised, full references have been added in the margin, Mr. P. S. Allen's edition of the letters of Erasmus has been consulted, with the result that a considerable number of the letters appear for the first time in their proper places in the calendar ; and, finally, an elaborate key has been provided in part iii so that one may at a glance discover the new reference number of any document in the old edition. When so much has been done, and so well done, it seems almost ungrateful to sit in criticism ; yet there are certain questions to which attention should be called. Is it, for instance, desirable to incorporate in this new edition fairly full summaries of documents already printed in Spanish or Venetian Calendars or other government publications ? Surely these would be accessible to any student who would be likely to consult the Letters and Papers, and when the time of competent editors is so valuable, the costs of publication so large, and so much still remains to be done, it seems that a mere reference to the printed version in the parallel series of calendars would have sufficed, unless there were some serious error to be corrected. We do not mean to imply that what Mr. Brodie has done in this connexion is without value, for he has obviously gone behind the calendars to the original transcripts, and has often given 1 Old edition, no. 1403.