Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (review)

196 Reviews from governance and power towards the lower orders. Anthony LuttreH's densely packed chapter on the volatile Latin East has some brilliant vignettes of individual h u m a n experiences. A longer preface was needed to deal with problems of approach and definition. The volume's concentration upon government, power and the development of the state requires more justification: also the concept of the state, central to the volume, deserved greater editorial definition. Allmand's conclusion to the volume gives the impression that 'the state' was a cohesive concept which could be used across all Europe, but striking contrasts in the last section between states ranging from the Ottoman Turks to Norway suggest that the concept needed a more extended explanation. Genet refers frequently to the 'modem state' with scant explanation of what he means by the term. Similarly, he uses the terms nation, kingdom and state, as if the terms were interchangeable. Genet chooses his political vocabulary with deliberation but he needs to explain and justify his conceptual building blocks with more care. O n the other hand, it must be acknowledged that some individual chapters do this. W i m Blockmans, for example, treats concepts, terminology and analytic framework for political 'Representations'. Despite reservations about its thematic emphasis upon governance and power as distinct from, rather than integrated with, church and universities, and the insufficiently direct treatment of religion and the lower orders and their social history, this volume is a rich aggregation of detailed and well written chapters covering sixteen large regions. M y reservations remain but admiration grows for this latest addition to a distinguished series. Barry Collett Department of History University of Melbourne Ames-Lewis, Francis, ed., Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth an Seventeenth Centuries, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999; cloth; pp. 272; 3 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. £37.50. Reviews 197 Sir Thomas Gresham is one of the best-known and most important members of the London mercantile community in the sixteenth century, even though he never participated in the City's cursus honorum and spent much of his working life abroad. Gresham played a vital role as the resident commercial agent of the English crown in Antwerp during the mid-Tudor period, most famously arranging for the reduction of Elizabeth's foreign debts and secret arms purchases during the early 1560s. Deprived of heirs to his fortune by the deaths ofhis son and niece, Gresham assured himself of a more lasting impact on his native city by creating the Royal Exchange in the late 1560s and by bequeathing its profits to endow professorships in divinity, astronomy, geometry, music, law, physic and rhetoric. Collectively, these professorships constituted Gresham College, which came into being in 1597 and was housed in Gresham's o w n mansion in Bishopsgate. Both institutions have survived to the present day,, albeit in very attenuated form: the tradition of the Royal Exchange (together with the elaborate tablecloth on which Gresham allegedly dined with Queen Elizabeth in 1570) is n o w vested in Royal Exchange Assurance Company PIc. This volume originated in a conference to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Gresham College in 1997. Like m a n y books based on conference proceedings, it is a decidedly patchy publication. As the subt i t l e suggests, many of the essays in this collection have little or no direct connection with either Gresham or his college. This lack of cohesion, coupled with the need to thank sponsors of the 1997 conference, perhaps explains the decidedly perfunctory introduction. Generally speaking, the papers in this volume either relate to various aspects of Gresham's l i f e or the more nebulous 'intellectual history' of Early Modern London. Even this description is somewhat loose because at least three of the latter essays actually have very little to say about London at all. Ann Saunders' essay on Gresham's London locale of Bishopsgate is disappointingly thin, but there is a useful, if brief, summary of modern historiography on Tudor London by Vanessa Harding. Ian Blanchard's chapter on Gresham's commercial career is also valuable and provides an...