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BOOK REVIEWS465 wishes for a public statement of his Catholic faith. He likewise declined Gregory XHTs offers of consecration either in Rome or Regensburg, thus implicitly repudiating papal authority in matters affecting Imperial dignity and power. The fact that relations were strained had obvious implications for the pope's religious policy in the Empire, which relied for its implementation on the Emperor 's firm commitment. Unsurprisingly, then, the accession of Maximilian's allegedly more tractable successor, Rudolf II, in 1576 was greeted with relief. The difficult preliminary negotiations between the Emperor and the German Electors for Rudolf's election as Roman king form a major theme of the correspondence . In the years 1575-76 the curia concentrated its efforts on the issues of Maximilian's candidature to the Polish throne, the Imperial succession, and the interrelated problems of heresy and clerical reform in the Empire and Bohemia. Military maters and the abortive Imperial peace initiative in the Netherlands, which was intended to liberate forces for the defense of the eastern border of the Empire, formed scarcely less important issues. Useful bits of information on Tuscan, Genuese, and Inner Austrian affairs can likewise be gleaned from the texts. Minor criticism of the present volume concerns a small number of headings which are too monosyllabic or imprecise to be of help to the reader (e.g., nos. 33, 73, 103, 104, 1 14, 1 16, 297, 358). There are also a few inconsistencies in the spelling of names and some instances in which biographical footnotes could have been more detailed, and might have been better placed on first mention of the name. However, this does not detract from Neri's very impressive achievement in producing an accomplished edition of valuable new material. Regina Pörtner German Historical Institute London Rome * Amsterdam: Two Growing Cities in Seventeenth-Century Europe. Edited by Peter van Kessel and Elisja Schulte. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Distributed by the University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. 1997. Pp. xxiv, 333. $54.50.) Rome * Amsterdam: Two Growing Cities in Seventeenth-Century Europe is a fascinating, wide-ranging, and ambitious collection of essays on two of the most important and complex locales of early modern Europe. Conceived as a series of thematic explorations of urban history, the editors have assembled an impressive list of international scholars to explore such disparate topics as: urban design, population, family, religion, and the treatment ofJews. As with any such collection, the contributions are of uneven quality and depth, but the book should provide a valuable resource for students and instructors of early modern Europe. One of the most impressive features of this volume are the rich images which adorn the book. Perhaps as much as the textual descriptions, these visual images provide intimate portraits of the particularities of life in seventeenth- 466BOOK REVIEWS century Rome and Amsterdam. The images vary from architectural plans to ink drawings, woodcuts, and stately portraits of seventeenth-century notables. Equally valuable are the many tables and graphs which offer useful data on such concerns as mortality and fertility rates, household size, and the numbers of criminal offenses over the course of the century. The first half of the volume concerns the broader institutional and structural aspects of urban life in seventeenth-century Rome and Amsterdam. Luigi Spezzaferro 's "Baroque Rome: A 'Modern City'" argues that it was the late sixteenthcentury pontificate of Sixtus V (1585-1590) which proved pivotal in the shift in Roman architecture and urban planning toward a modern orientation. Conceptualizing this revived Roman urban space as a kind of "theater of modern life," Spezzaferro notes the "novelty" of the city plans developed by the pope's designers (and those of his successors) as forward-looking, and integrated more realistically with the living city, rather than pointing backward toward the Eternal City's ancient past. Koen Ottenheym's "The Amsterdam Ring of Canals: City Planning and Architecture " provides a detailed and insightful discussion of the development of socially-differentiated residential and industrial neighborhoods through the construction of new canals in the seventeenth century. This building project, the historian notes, was geared toward meeting the demands of the rising merchant elites, rather than a public works project to beautify...

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