Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/621

 1922 SHORT NOTICES 613 in such financial straits that he was willing to hand over all the goods, or their equivalent in money, with the prisoners taken in the ship, and their ransoms, to one Nicholas de Rodom, so long as Nicholas would pay him 66 13s. d. within three months. The calendar is full of the minor vexations and delays which hampered medieval administration : officials too old, or too lazy, or too infirm, to do their work properly ; incompetent substitutes making mischief in the absence of their superiors ; orders neglected or even defied. Not every one could make such short work of other people's deficiencies as did William Daunvers, yeoman of the house- hold. In February 1350 he had received a grant of l^d. a day for wages and 40s. a year for robes, to be received from the sheriff of Southampton out of certain issues in his bailiwick. By March 1351 he had decided that this method did not ensure sufficiently ' prompt payment ', and secured a royal grant ' that he may himself collect and levy the said farm and rent for life, retaining such sum as is required for his said wages and robes, and answering at the Exchequer for the balance ' (p. 283). Attention may be drawn in conclusion to the orders (pp. 181, 226-7) issued in 1349 to the sheriffs of London, and in 1350 to twenty-eight escheators, to seize lands and tenements which the mendicant friars had acquired nominally to enlarge their dwellings, but actually to rent to laymen, ' whereas they ought to live by begging according to their rule '. H. J. In a volume of nearly seven hundred pages, entitled Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920), Dr. T. F. Crane has collected a mass of interesting material covering a somewhat wide range of topics. Beginning with the Prove^al tenzon and joc-partit, he traces the development of these forms of social diversion and the transformations which they underwent on Italian soil. An analysis of Boccaccio's romance Filocolo as illustrative of society at the court of King Robert of Naples marks the transition from Provence to Italy. From thence we are led through the revival of Platonic studies to the growth of academies and to the numerous treatises on love which were written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. From love we pass to parlour games, in which the Sienese were acknowledged specialists, and to works on manners and etiquette. Among the more important treatises of which detailed analyses are given are Gli Asolani of Bembo, Castiglione's II Cortegiano, II Dialogo de' Giuochi by Girolamo Bargagli of Siena, and La Civil Conversazione of Stefano Guazzo. The concluding chapters of the book are devoted to the influence of Italy upon the social customs of France, England Germany, and Spain. As a picture of renaissance society the book suffers somewhat from its very merits from the point of view of scholarship. The essential light-heartedness and charm of Italian social life cannot easily be captured amid elaborate analyses and exhaustive references. Nevertheless the most characteristic features of polite society in sixteenth -century Italy are there for those who have the perseverance to look for them. Dr. Crane writes of ' the passion for conversation ' which made the dialogue the most popular of literary forms, and changed the academies from learned bodies into companies of clever young men and women who met to amuse themselves in each other's