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Reviews 237 form Part 1, Chapters 1 to 4, and Part II, Chapters 5 to 7. Part III has two chapters: Chapter 8 on 'Chorography' (especiaUy that of Camden in Britannia, EngUsh edition, 1610); and the ninth and last chapter on rural poetics. These two chapters are certainly not add-ons. They underscore and develop the significance of literature as a means by which the new rural capitalism was validated. In this McRae's work shows us the origins of what Davidoff and others have described as the heau idyll', that organic fusion of rural (male) power and image which dominated England in the industrialising nineteenth century, and which survives well into the twentieth century in the so-called 'settler societies' of the British Empire and Commonwealth, where the hible and the plough' have been a privileged discourse. McRae has read exhaustively in his period. A recent independent C D - R O M search of English literature from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, compiled for an anthology of the plough, disclosed thousands of textual references. McRae has used many of those found in his outstanding work, and he has a superb eye for the apt quotation. In Parergon 14.1, July, 1996, the author has amplified his presentation of the ploughman as a 'fashioned' cultural icon. In time he may also use the period's art and music. With God Speed the Plough, Andrew McRae has wonderfully enhanced our understanding of agrarian England from 1500 to 1660. T o m Stannage Department of History University of Western Australia Monks, Peter R., Patrons and Devotion. The University of Sydney's Hou of Anne la Routye, Marrickvtile, N e w South Wa le s / Southwood Press, 1995; cloth; pp. xi, 91; 35 b / w plates; R.R.P. not known. This book is in the w e U established format of the partial facsimile, in which the principal illustrated pages of a particular medieval manuscript are reproduced, accompanied by individual commentaries, with a more comprehensive discussion of the significance of the work being supplied in the Introduction. The publication is a welcome addition to the growing literature on 238 Reviews medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in Australian collections, particularly since the work in question is a fine example of a Book of Hours produced by one of the leading schools of manuscript illumination in mid to late fifteenth-century Paris, with some interesting early sixteenth-century textual and artistic additions. Both the genre, the Book of Hours, and this period of French book illumination are the focus of Uvely research today and publications tike this help to ensure that the material held in Australia becomes an integral part of these investigations. The author is well equipped for his task. Peter Monks has published extensively on the Master of Jean Rolin, active in Paris c. 1440-1465, and it is an associate of this master w h o is responsible for the fifteenth-century miniatures in the Sydney Hours. Monks's consultation with the distinguished medievalist, Emeritus Professor Keith Sinclair, w h o has written a foreword to the publication, ensures the accurate and detailed recording of the book's textual contents, which are listed in a detailed appendix. The title of the book indicates the author's interest in matters of patronage. Monks states that the absence of armorial or heraldic devises implies that the person for w h o m the book was made was not ennobled. It is by no means certain, however, that books for the nobility were always distinguished by such insignia. Since the image of a w o m a n in contemporary dress appears both in the composition of the Pietatilustratingthe hymn, Stabat Mater, and in the scene of the wrapping of a corpse for burial that introduces the Vigils of the Dead, Monks suggests that the book m a y have been commissioned as a memorial of some kind. The fact that the Stabat Mater is not one of the basic texts regularly included in a Book of Hours adds weight to this proposal as does the presence of a lengthy prayer to be recited in time of tribulation. O n the other hand, it...

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