This is a true bibliophile's book, which is unsurprising given that Alexander Wilkinson is currently a British Academy postdoctoral Fellow and manager of the University of St Andrews Sixteenth-Century French Vernacular Book Project; it is based on his recent doctoral thesis. Indeed, it is a most engaging work and makes a worthy contribution to the wealth of publications on Mary Queen of Scots; it should appeal to a wide audience. In seeking ‘to analyse the extent and nature of French interest in the career of Mary Queen of Scots’ (p. 6), Wilkinson concentrates mainly on the published sources, especially those concerning the 1580s following Mary's execution by Queen Elizabeth in 1587, and on the religious upheavals in France and the execution of the duke of Guise (Mary's nephew), leader of the Catholic League, by Henri iii in 1588. The excellent compilation of not only sixteenth-century publications but also later printed primary sources is probably of the greatest interest to readers of this Journal, although why a distinction is made between the former, entitled ‘primary sources’, and the latter as ‘reprinted primary sources’ is unclear; all these should be listed as printed primary sources. There seems to be, however, an undue reverence given to the sixteenth-century pamphlets on the lifetime of Mary Queen of Scots which are used as primary evidence with little or no other documentary primary source material (i.e. unpublished manuscripts) to substantiate the claims made for evaluating public opinion. This is important because it exposes the time-honoured problem for historians of the period of how to quantify public opinion. In fact, this book amply demonstrates that literary scholars and historians view the past from very different perspectives and, more important, use very different methods for its analysis. Wilkinson's method of initially citing certain manuscript sources, and then adding a secondary source reference is confusing: it requires consultation of the ‘archival sources’ section in the bibliography to clarify the origin of the reference. Furthermore, there is a very narrow focus on secondary sources; only about half of those publications listed are cited in the text. Factual errors make most historians feel insecure, especially when they appear early in the text as they do here. Henri ii's unexpected and untimely death occurred on 10 July 1559 (not ‘1560’, p. 5); it was his son, Francis ii, Mary's first husband, who died on 6 December 1560. The date of Henri ii's death, following a jousting injury during the celebrations of the Peace Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, is important because his demise completely changed European history and the life of Mary Queen of Scots. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that scholars will welcome this additional research on French publications, which widens our knowledge of the last years of Mary Queen of Scots. There may, however, be those who might take issue with the methods used.