Correspondence du nonce en France. Gasparo Silingardi évêque de Modène (1599-1601). Edited By Bertrand Haan. (Acta Nuntiaturae Gallicae, 17.) Pp. xxxvii+597+frontispiece. Rome: École française de Rome/Université Pontificale Grégorienne, 2002. 2 7283 0603 6; 88 7652 919 5

0 521 81126 0 JEH (54) 2003; DOI: 10.1017/S0022046903218091 Nowhere in early modern Europe was mortality more starkly apparent than in the great cities, where deaths outnumbered births, a third or more of all individuals born probably died in infancy or early childhood, death knells and funerals were part of daily experience, and terrifying, unpredictable epidemics sometimes killed a fth of the inhabitants, forcing the living to nd new space for the legions of the dead. Earlier studies emphasised thematic polarities: heresy became a favourite theme whether it was lay rebellion against the religious discipline enforced by the institutional Roman Church or theological responses to Protestantism; other polarities were perceived in socio-economic groups, or along a spectrum ranging from those who sympathised with Protestant insights to intransigenti who saw danger lurking in all reform. Here one may ask whether such a claim can be sustained. [...]on the dust jacket the present volume is described as covering the crucial turning point in Poles life: his break with Henry and the substitution of papal service for royal, involving a profound religious conversion which took Pole to one of the dening moments of the Italian Reformation and, one may add, the early stages of the Council of Trent to 1546. [...]it is claimed that these letters are a source of