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of that at the time' -any more committed students who have by chance stumbled across different views in their libraries will not find contrary assertions here very helpful. Loades does not think his students will mind if what they learn in one place is contradicted by what they learn in another. 'Late medieval England was the most centralised and unified monarchy in Europe', they are told on page one; 'by the end of Elizabeth's reign England was highly unified, but not particularly centralised', they learn on page four. The links between sections, indeed between sentences in the same paragraph, are often far from obvious. On page 114 we learn that 'clothes and manners were probably the first things which visitors to the court noticed, and the first fashions which they emulated on their return home. However, under Elizabeth the Chapel Royal was more important, which explains the agitation of the puritanically inclined at the reappearance of the cross and candlesticks upon the altar at St James's in 1560.' The same paragraph goes on to discuss 'the transformation in aristocratic education'. Yet, despite all these serious imperfections, presumably evidence of hasty writing and insufficient editing, Loades's students will not have wasted their time, perhaps particularly if they heard rather than read the lectures that are embodied in this book. If their attention wandered, they did not need to fear that they were missing a crucial stage in a tightly-controlled argument. And when they concentrated, they would have heard much that was sound common sense (if not always new), some unusual and striking examples, and even, here and there, some quite shrewd suggestions. G.W.BERNARD Southampton BRITISH CONSCIOUSNESS AND IDENTITY: THE MAKING OF BRITAIN, 1533-1707. Edited by Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xii, 354. £ 45.00. This is a useful collection of eleven essays on the now fashionable subject of the 'new British history'. It aims to broaden the British agenda by discussing how far a shared political identity developed among the communities comprehended in the new state. The editors' preface announces confusingly an intention to explore 'the historic stability of the United Kingdom' while also 'point[ing] up the fragility of the Union' (P-xi). In practice, however, most of the essays address the question of British consciousness and identity from a national standpoint. They