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618 SHORT NOTICES October in the sixteenth century has a purely relative and local significance. The tillage act provided no effective remedy and would if carried out have stopped all improvement. The Crown through the farmers of its demesne took a leading part in enclosure in the interests of its revenue. The detailed study of this complex economic development, so admirably inaugurated by Mr. Tawney, needs to be carried through the seventeenth century before we can hope to understand some of the central aspects of English social history. In the meantime Mr. Curtler's book furnishes a useful and well-balanced survey of existing knowledge. G. U. In his Geschichte des Europdischen Staatensystems von 1492 bis 1559 in the series ' Handbuch der Mittelalterlichen und Neueren Geschichte ' (Munich : Oldenbourg, 1919) Dr. Eduard Fueter has essayed a task somewhat novel, a review of the institutions, methods, and equipment of European states and of their relations with each other. Those who know his Religion und Kirche in England im filnfzehnten Jahrhundert (1904) and his Geschichte der neueren Historiographie (reviewed in these pages in 1912 *) will not be surprised at his taking a line of his own and following it with success. And they will find that once more, to quote the words of his former critic, he has done it ' without a superfluous word '. In this new work, which has waited too long for review, he gives the student help got with difficulty elsewhere, as he deals with arrangement of material and judgements upon history, rather than with history itself. The know- ledge of details is extensive but never obtrusive, and the bibliography is thorough, although for Venice Mr. Horatio Brown might have been referred to. The book might be described as an introduction to the history of the period, and as such it gives adequate guidance. The detached point of view enables this to be given better than in some other works where the religious and doctrinal issues are allowed to overlie the political and constitutional : significantly, therefore, the Reformation does not fill much space. We are dealing with a world which was changing, apart from religion and thought, under the influence of other forces comparable with them. The writer is concerned (as many students and some writers of history should be) mainly with the European system of states and with political organization. These changed less than is sometimes supposed, but such change as there was is fully sketched in one large section, following the sketch of the states as they were, to begin with. The first section describes the institu- tions and tendencies of international policy, diplomacy, military forces (upon which much information is admirably and concisely summarized), commerce, intellectual and religious tendencies, and so on. The second section takes the states one by one ; for Venice, for instance, we have commerce, internal organization, army, navy, diplomacy, foreign policy, towards Turkey, the Italian states, and Austria. The pages on Venetian diplomacy very briefly correct a too general over-estimate, in a way typical of the work. The third and fourth sections sketch the changes in the system of states from 1492 to 1559, turning mainly upon the successive Italian campaigns. The book might be described as a statesman's historical manual, doing for the period what the annuals of the same type do for 1 Ante, xxvii. 124.