2. Book Reviews 457
most from Hall’s work, outsiders (such as I) can still learn a good deal about the conduct
of debates in early modern science and the way in which they are being treated in cur-
rent scholarly literature if they are willing to put in the effort to follow the author’s line of
argument.
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The Adventures of Brusanus, Prince of Hungaria (1592). Barnabe Riche.
Ed. Joseph Khoury.
Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014. 383 pp. $28.00.
ISBN 978-0-7727-2144-0.
Reviewed by: Michael A. Cramer
Borough of Manhattan Community College
Barnabe Riche, Gentleman, was a soldier, an author, and a government informer. He
was captain of a company in the Low Countries and in Ireland, and his best known works
are military histories. His most important work was Riche, His Farewell to Militarie Profes-
sion (1581), not only as a look at the attitudes of an Elizabethan soldier but as an important
source for Shakespeare, providing portions of the plots of Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet,
and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
The Adventures of Brusanus, Prince of Hungaria, published in a new edition by Joseph
Khoury, is an oft-maligned book that has been of interest primarily as the source for the
plot of Measure for Measure. However, in his well-written and exhaustive introduction,
Khoury makes a strong case for Brusanus as deserving an important place in the history
of the novel. Citing Regina Schneider, Khoury argues that, along with Sidney’s “Eclogues,”
Brusanus is the source of “novelistic narrative,” in which multiple voices speak to the reader
(24). “The Adventures of Brusanus is a book that must be valued in its own right, not simply
as a source text or as a historical curiosity” (91). After reading, I agree. It is good.
Brusanus also serves as a crash-course in Elizabethan and late medieval genre fiction.
It is first and foremost a euphuistic novel (after John Lyly’s Euphus, the Anatomy of Life),
employing an exaggerated style meant to imitate courtly life, both in tone and through the
use of rhetoric (31). But Riche employs other genres, including Bildunsgsroman, martial
tale, querelle des femmes, and chivalric romance. His use of soliloquy provides insight into
Hamlet and Macbeth, while double plotting informs how we look on A Midsummer Night’s
Dream and A Comedy of Errors. Khoury maintains,
Riche’s new style is radical. With conflationary bravura, onto the Lylyan and
Heliodoran worldviews he tacks medieval chivalric plotting based on the exploit
adventure, with its triple order of service to females, martial prowess, and the
practical virtues of a medieval knight. (58)
Typical of Elizabethan prose, it is also a pastiche, imitative in particular of Lyly and of
Robert Greene. Often lifting lines verbatim from their works, it illustrates clearly how much
of Elizabethan literature relied on what we would now term plagiarism, but which, at the
time, was perfectly acceptable.
The text itself is a bit archaic. Riche’s prose is long-winded and a difficult slog to a
modern reader, but in it can be found echoes of Sidney and Shakespeare. The footnotes
make the language clearer, and it is an entertaining and at times exciting story.

3. 458 Sixteenth Century Journal XLVI/2 (2015)
Khoury’s introduction does a good job of putting Riche’s work into context. By itself
the introduction can be read as a primer on Elizabethan prose fiction. With Riche’s text
it reveals the complex interplay of styles and the occasional plagiarism that marked the
literature of Shakespeare’s day (Shakespeare was, after all, the most successful plagiarist of
all time). It is a great read, and would make a good addition to the libraries of students of
English literature, of the theater, or of Renaissance studies. I highly recommend it.
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From Mutual Observation to Propaganda War: Premodern Revolts in Their
Transnational Representations. Ed. Malte Griesse.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 354 pp. $40.00. ISBN
978-3-8376-2642-1.
Reviewed by: Brian G. H. Ditcham
Gillingham, Kent, UK
The seventeenth century was an age of rebellions, like other centuries before and since.
The rebellions of that era, however, took place in an increasingly interconnected world
where, at least in Europe, a nascent culture of news gathering and publication meant that
a Dutch town dweller could follow uprisings deep in the heart of the Russian empire in
the newspapers, though with little way of knowing how accurate the reports were. In turn,
rulers began to worry about how their realms were reported in lands at the other end of the
Continent and even engage in a process of image management.
These developments are the nominal focus for the volume under review, though by
no means all ten contributions directly address them; the geographical coverage is heavily
weighted toward Russia and the eastern marches of Poland-Lithuania.
The ten contributions are paired in five sections, though some of the couplings seem
forced. The first includes the one chronological outlier, a piece by Helmut Hinck and Bettina
Bommersbach examining how English chroniclers reported uprisings in France during the
Hundred Years’ War and vice versa. There was little cross border interest in such rebellions
by comparison with the coverage both English and French writers gave to events in Flan-
ders or even Rome. Concern about the social order usually trumped sympathy with those
rebelling against “the enemy,” though writers such as Thomas Walsingham might project
English concerns on to French rebels, perhaps as a form of indirect criticism of their own
governments. Only Froissart drew revolts across Europe together to perceive transnational
subversive forces at work. This is paired with Maureen Perrie’s examination of how Russian
pretenders (particularly the successive False Dmitriis) were perceived by west European
observers. Both those who accepted the claims of the First False Dmitri and those who
rejected them worked within established cultural constructs. The former drew on the arche-
type of the hidden true monarch claiming his legitimate inheritance from a usurper, the
latter pointed to a long line of pseudoroyal impostors up to the near-contemporary pseudo-
Sebastian of Portugal and hinted at Jesuit manipulations. While western opinion divided
on the First Dmitri, however, nobody took his successive reincarnations, or the pretenders
linked to later Russian rebels, seriously.
The next coupling sets a short and rather acerbic piece by Yves-Marie Bercé on the
linkages between rebellion and periods in which authority lapsed (for instance on the death
of a monarch) alongside Andre Berelowitch’s examination of western eyewitness accounts
of the Stefan/Stenka Razin rebellion in 1670–71. By and large, making due allowance for
social prejudices, these seem to have been fairly accurate (or at least in line with Russian