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 144 SHORT NOTICES January significant detail and is not led away by abstractions. For example, his analysis of feudalism and of the rise of towns, though not picturesque, is realistic and informing. In general, he is at his best when he discusses the play upon each other of political and economic influences, as in the rise of social classes, the growth of trade, or the eastward expansion of German civilization. The treatment of spiritual movements and of the great literary revivals is so incidental as to be perfunctory. Dr. Hellmann's view of the range of the mutual relations between east and west is limited. The history of the kingdom of Sicily is a test case. Dr. Hellmann naturally lays stress upon its importance, and rounds off his book with a chapter on Frederick II, yet he is indifferent to the very great significance of the Sicilian state as a centre of artistic and literary influences. His general point of view is too Germanic, and his bibliographical notes suggest that he has been content to follow the lead of two or three groups of German scholars. Yet, within its limits, this is a good book which should not be neglected. F. M. P. The inaugural lecture of Mr. A. J. Toynbee as Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine Language, Literature, and History, published, with a foreword by M. Gennadius, under the title The Place of Mediaeval and Modern Greece in History (London : Privately printed, 1919), is a study of the resemblances between the histories of eastern and western Europe in medieval and modern times, severely criticizing the ' traditional view '. This, we are told, derives from Gibbon, and has now been challenged by more modern writers : it is that to the dark age in the west before the eighth century there was no corresponding period in the east ; the dark age of the east was the period beginning in 1453. Having stated the traditional view in this way, the lecturer finds no difficulty in demolishing it, and then passes on to develop the idea that there was in the east between the sixth and the eighth century a ' dark age ' and a change comparable to the contemporary events in the west. From this period of change the medieval and modern Greek culture sprang, just as the end of the dark age in the west was the beginning of the modern culture of western Europe. In the brief space at our disposal it must be enough to say that even holders of the ' traditional view ' see a wide difference in historical import between the fall of old Kome and the fall of new Home, and that, however attractively Professor Toynbee sets out his theory, he has exaggerated the breach in continuity formed by his dark age in the east. A second point of the lecture is that the Ottoman domination was 1 less of a break than it is traditionally considered '. K. M. D. Mr. H. C. Lea spent a long life in mastering the history of the inquisi- tion, and the results of his fruitful labours are embodied in many volumes. There is need of a short book criticizing the American historian's con- clusions in the light of recent research, and such a book Mr. A. S. Turber- ville has given us in his Mediaeval Heresy and the Inquisition (London : Crosby Lockwood, 1920). He has taken trouble to read some of the original documents, he has studied the new monographs with care, and he has thought out his remarks with insight. The outcome is a volume