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184 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 of African family patterns- will someday be extended to include homosexual histories. Essays by Robert Shephard, Joseph Cady, and Guy Poirier directly address homosexuality in England and France. Demonstrating the different effects of misogyny and homophobia on the reputations of Elizabeth I and James I, Shephard suggests thatposthumous criticisms ofJames's relations with male favourites likely represent 'propaganda' and not a loathing of homosexualbehaviour.Cady, meantime, argues for a premodernexistence of 'what we would now call a "homosexual orientation,'" and Poirier makes the vital point that homophobic French representations of Ottoman and Arab sexual 'otherness' reflect Europeans' own cultural and sexual anxieties~ These essays, along with others by Carol Kazmierczak Manzione (on sexualoffence and institutional control), Ruth Mazo Karras (onprostitution and misogyny), Rona Goffen (on Titian's gender politics), and Andrew Taylor (on eroticized reading), make Desire and Discipline compelling evidence not only of premodern erotic concepts and practices, but also of the vitality of sexuality studies. I only hope that if the book goes into a second edition the editors will provideanindex, a componentwhich would enhance accessibility to this anthology's rich mine of information. (MICHAEL MORGAN HOLMES) David Dean. Law-Making and Society in Late Elizabethan England: The Parliament ofEngland, 1584-1601 Cambridge University Press. xv, 312. us $59.95 The ten parliaments that were summoned to Westminster by Queen Elizabeth I in the forty-four years ofher reign have received more than their fair share of attention from English historians over the past fifty years. Building on the work of Pollard and Notestein in the 1920S and .19308, Sir John Neale established an orthodoxy in the two decades after 1945 which located the political and constitutional origins Of the 'Puritan Revolution' in the Elizabethan parliament. By focusing on the evidence of political conflict in the various parliaments, and by creating the 'Puritan choir' led by Peter Wentworth and Thomas Norton as the primary agents of change and the intellectual fathers of John Pym and Oliver Cromwell, the great University of London historian built a construct that recent revisionist scholars have had a hard time demolishing. David Dean's book under review is testimony to that fact. One of the most credible and devastating critiques of Neale's view of the importance of the Elizabethan parliaments was developed by Geoffrey Elton. After giving the first part of his career to the creation of a paradigm centred on the Henrician and Cromwellian reforms, Elton ended his HUMANITIES 185 professional life by attempting to destroy the one built around Elizabeth's parliaments. In the end, Dean writes, his supervisor and mentor concluded that Neale's parliaments played 'little part in the major political issues of the day [nor] served as a central focus for opposition to the Crown.' Geoffrey Elton reached unequivocal conclusions about the political and constitutional significance of the Elizabethan parliaments. David Dean is less certain that his mentor was right. His book picks up the story of Elizabethan parliamentarylegislation where his supervisor left off, namely in the parliament of 1584.ln many respects it follows in Elton's footsteps. It focuses not on 'episodes of conflict' but on the 'variety of legislative activity in these parliaments.' It is a thorough and comprehensive study of the approximately six hundred bills presented to one or both Houses, of which only a small number actually saw the light of day following the queen's assent. The book is comprehensive in its coverage and pays attention to a huge array of topics ranging from supply and the safety of the realm during the security crisis of the mid-158os to 27 Elizabeth C.20, which permitted Plymouth to increase its fresh water supply 'by cutting a trench from the River Meavy.' The author is successful in locating his subject in its appropriate historiographical contextand inproviding a scholarly analysis of the social and economic concerns of the parliamentary classes as reflected in the laws they made - or tried to make. The author even makes a valiant effort to make a study of a subject that is apt to be a little dry more current by introducing a few observations on the 'gendered assumptions' ofthe Elizabethanparliament-men. What...

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